N.B. This also applies to characters from the follow-up, “Whatever Happened to Janie?” and the TV adaptation that combined elements from both books starring Kellie Martin.
Reeve, Janie’s stupid handsome helpful boyfriend, who takes every opportunity to ask Janie, “What if we just blew all this off and went to a hotel room and DID IT,” like when she’s crying about finding out the people who raised her aren’t actually her parents, or when she’s trying to find out who her parents are, or when she meets her biological parents for the first time. REEVE. GUY. I KNOW YOUR FACE IS SYMMETRICAL AND YOU’RE EXCITED ABOUT GETTING TO SHAVE, but this is not a book about Doing It for the first time, this is a book about how everyone in the world has been lying to your girlfriend, and she does not have time for your body right now. Save it for later, Reeve! Your body won’t spoil, it’s not perishable, or at least not in this time frame it isn’t!
Sarah-Charlotte, Janie’s friend who was drinking the carton of milk with Janie’s picture on it, for causing all this mess. This book could have been about Janie going to prom and losing her virginity to a less annoying virgin of Reeve, but you had to ruin everything with your milk and your two names, Sarah-Charlotte. I hope you’re happy.
Janie’s old as hell parents for not coming up with a better cover story or strategy than just “hope Janie never asks us a single question about the first five years of her life.” When someone shows up on your doorstep with a kid and says “Don’t worry about it” when you ask for a birth certificate or medical records, you don’t just take the baby, move out of town, and change your name, and then start volunteering a lot! You definitely suspected she was a little bit kidnapped, which is fine, but own your choices and strategize. You two fell apart the second the game got a little rough, and I can’t respect that.
Jodie and Stephen, Janie’s USELESS siblings, who I mentally assign the same category as Andrea’s useless friends in The Devil Wears Prada. Oh, you’re mad at Janie for not immediately fitting in to your stupid close-knit family? SHE GOT KIDNAPPED, YOU EMOTIONAL LEECHES. NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO MAKE RELATIONAL DEMANDS. Maybe give her some space before you ask her to join your weird Sound of Music-style gang. Kellie Martin is a goddamn TREASURE and she is going through a LOT and you need to BACK OFF.
Janie is perfect and everyone else needs to get off of her fucking case. Janie you are going through a lot and everyone wants something from you but not me, Janie. You yell at everybody because yours is the most justified case of teenage angst ever to come down the pike. Nobody understands you, not even the milk carton.
Janie’s biological parents for just being unbearably cheesy. I read this book when I was fourteen, which is the age of greatest resistance to forced cheer, and I have hated them ever since. STOP BEING SO HAPPY. LIFE IS SUFFERING AND YOU MUST ACKNOWLEDGE IT.
The New York City police officer who points to a random homeless woman and tells Janie that LIFE has probably punished Hannah enough because odds are good that she is living on the streets with an untreated mental illness, which, WHOA, GUY, a of all, that is not how the police are supposed to respond to someone saying, “Hey, I was deeply kidnapped as a child,” like, “Oh, well, don’t worry, your kidnapper is probably SUPER sad and impoverished now, that’s just what happens to people who join cults” and b of all, I know the cops aren’t actually invested in mental health services, but shouldn’t you like, at least a little bit of pretend to care that this obviously disturbed woman isn’t receiving treatment for her numerous issues? Like, if you don’t want to throw her in jail for the kidnapping, wouldn’t it at the least be nice to get her to a hospital? You can’t trust cops to care about justice, that’s the lesson of this book, I guess, which is not a bad moral for a book.
Lord, these books petrified me as a child and I was convinced that I would be sucked into a cult in university. But seriously: YOU ALL SUCK. Every person in the book besides Janie! Her biological siblings in particular! “I know you were kidnapped and brought up in a totally different family for eleven years, why aren’t you acting like my real sister who I’ve spent every day with since birth????” OH MY GOD
I can totally understand younger kids not really “getting” it, but her siblings were way too old for that excuse. They were just weirdly lacking in empathy.
Also, I get that her biological parents wanted her back, but did they really think telling her parents who raised her “No, we got it now, don’t come around” was going to work out? Come on.
Also their jealousy of her upbringing! I specifically remember Janie telling them she rode horses and them being like “ugh, spoiled rich girl!” Janie was just living her life! Now that everything has been turned upside down for her could you assholes try to be more understanding? And that is exactly the kind of behavior that is going to make her long for her old life!
A cult actually tried to recruit me while I was at university. The recruiter pretended to be conducting a survey for his sociology class, then all of a sudden got into this whole thing about God and original sin. We had an argument about theology in the campus center coffee shop.
Was the real sociology experiment whether or not people would join his cult?
ACAB.
Raise your hand if being the face on the milk carton was your #1 childhood fantasy.
Mine was always having a secret twin out there. I may have watched The Parent Trap too many times.
My other Parent Trap fantasy was that my sister and I (not twins) could switch places without anyone noticing. Yes, my sister and I have occasionally been mistaken for each other or for twins by distant acquaintances who haven’t seen either of us in years. NO, we could not fool OUR ACTUAL PARENTS WHO KNEW WHO THE HELL WE WERE, ESPECIALLY BECAUSE NOT ACTUALLY TWINS.
Is terrible that I’m legit kind of afraid of having twins and not being able to tell them apart? I’m kinda face blind as it is…
I have spent actual time wondering what percentage of identical twins end up accidentally swapped by their parents before they’re old enough to know their own names.
OH MY GOD I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE
Probably most, unless the parents were careful about ID bracelets. How would you know?
Identical twin weighing in–my twin and I never looked that much alike to our parents. We were over a pound different in weight at birth, different lengths, had different shaped faces, etc. I guess when you spend that much time dealing with a small human their features get pretty burned into your brain…?
Not a twin, but when I worked with kids, I met several sets of identical twins. They can be surprisingly not-identical! Though in general, some are better at telling people apart than others.
I ran a summer program with a pair of twin brothers. The teacher who assisted me could not tell one from the other, but a twelve-year-old in the group always insisted “they look nothing alike!”
Another pair of twin brothers in a summer camp I worked for, I could only tell apart because one brother had a mole on his neck.
I assume birthmarks and the like. And maybe painting each one’s big toenail a different color, like with turtles.
But like, actually.
I was very bored as a child, maybe? I really thought this would be an exciting thing to discover.
No, because Whatever Happened to Janie was so painful. There is no perfect outcome – you have to try to adjust to a completely new life and leave the people you thought were your parents behind, or you have to crush your biological parents’ dreams (they stayed in their too-small house for twelve years just in case their daughter tried to come home! They never stopped missing her!). I found the thought of it terrifying.
Mine was being Mandy from this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10332.Mandy,
I desperately wanted my own garden AND cottage. Still do.
Written by Dame Julie Andrews herself.
Yes, another Mandy lover! I read that book over and over until it fell apart. I need to seek out another copy sometime.
A ROOM ENTIRELY COVERED IN SHELLS.
I RECENTLY FOUND ANOTHER COPY AT A USED BOOKSTORE FOR $1 AND IT IS BEAUTIFUL.
Also my name is Mandy *swoon*
These books have stuck with me probably more than any other YA novels I’ve ever read.
Perhaps my favorite thing about them is how clearly they show that it’s the little things you never think about that define normalcy for you yet differentiate one family from another. Janie’s adoptive family eats sandwiches; her biological family eats no sandwiches. At her adoptive parents’ house, everyone kept their shampoo in the shower; at her biological parents’ house, everyone carted their stuff back and forth in little buckets. Neither option is technically *bad*, but one is what you’re *used to.*
At least in the short run, this is stuff that would drive you crazy perhaps even more than the major differences, like how much less money her biological parents had. (Sidebar: how did Janie’s adoptive parents manage to accrue so much wealth while also always being a little bit on the lam? I feel like suddenly abandoning your past, including your established work history, would make that difficult.)
Her dad kept working for IBM, I think, IBM was totally OK with his reasons for moving and changing his name and NO ONE in HR was like “so maybe? the your daughter and the cult thing? like does the little girl she dropped at your place? look like this little girl?”
Because her parents say they didn’t know she was kidnapped because they were so busy moving and dealing with a toddler, but there have to be at least one supervisor and three people in HR who tracked their move, right?
No no no. Not eating sandwiches?? Carrying around your shampoo?! Those people are sick.
I mean, I will buy sandwiches at a Which Wich or something, but I don’t like making my own sandwiches, so if I were looking to make a quick, easy lunch at home I would probably just reheat some leftovers.
So true. I hate doing things differently when I’m staying with someone for a few days! “You guys only drink Gatorade? And there’s no filtered drinking water? And I have to go hunt for Q-tips because I forgot to bring some??”
It would be a nightmare to be thrust into that for the foreseeable future 🙁
The bio family’s love of bold colours is what really stood out to me when I was a YA… my awareness of cobalt blue specifically came from this book.
AHHH these books were my favourite and I somehow didn’t even know there was a movie? What is happening, I am clearly not living my best life, gonna drop everything and watch this mess asap.
Yesssss, watch iiiiiiiit. This is some primo YA TV drama right here. I think I probably watched it every time it was on.
Seconding (thirding?) the “watch iiiiiiit” and adding: and then follow up with my secret favorite Lifetime original movie starting Kellie Martin — A Friend to Die For. It is terrible and cheesy and stars Tori Spelling, too, but I love it and will watch the whole thing through any time I catch it running.
YES! That has to be one of the primo movies. And all these years later, I’m still like “who the hell slices up cucumbers and eats them WHILE driving?”
(I have Complex Feelings about Kellie Martin because when I was super-little, my dad told me Becca on Life Goes On reminded him of me, and I was about 7 when that went off the air? Which is some complicated shit? In retrospect, he may have just meant the bit in the theme song where where she dramatically yanks off her glasses and glamour-flips her hair in the mirror, but still.)
And touches up her lip gloss, yep, yep! (I loved that show, too. Maybe I just have a weak spot for Kellie Martin.)
This book could have been about Janie going to prom and losing her virginity to a less annoying virgin of Reeve
Greatest typo ever?
Yep.
but was it a typo? losing your virginity to a non-annoying virgin would be a pretty great book.
Also probably a pretty short and underwhelming book, but in a good way?
Like, maybe you just need to kill five minutes on the bus, but you’re in public and you’ve got a lot of shit to deal with so you don’t want to read anything too heavy, and you hate it when books get all clingy, idk
Yeah, I’d totally read that if it was short and realistic. I’m hate-reading “The One & Only” by Emily Giffin and the first time the protagonist has sex with her new boyfriend everything is perfect and everyone finishes at the same time. I’d like to set the book on fire.
I would love to read more realistic, totally awkward, but still sweet and yummy sex. Sex where people misunderstand each other, or feel kinda gross, or have panic attacks. Ok, so maybe that’s not so yummy, but… real? Maybe I’m reading the wrong books.
So I just finished my first book and it’s sitting at the publisher and should they decide they want it (*fingers crossed*) pretty much the only thing I’m super unwilling to change even a little bit is my character losing her virginity. It’s awkward and it hurts and she grows to like it, but there are no instant orgasms from penetration and dammit, I just need to know one book in the world includes an actual accurate losing-their-virginity scene.
YAY FOR YOU!!! Sending all the mojo I can muster.
One of the main things I remember from the first chapter or so is Janie thinking that she wanted two children someday named Denim and Lace. Even at twelve or so, I realized that was a terrible idea but it gave me immediate respect for all of Janie’s life choices from then on out anyway.
Does anyone else remember The Voice on the Radio? It’s the third book, I think, where Reeve goes to college and get a slot on the college radio station and starts filling dead air by retelling all of Janie’s life story and trauma in installments and it becomes kind of a phenomenon on campus and everyone’s riveted by this whole terrible melodrama. But he never tells Janie he’s telling all her secrets to anyone in radio signal distance until she comes up to visit him and people go, “OMG, are you THE Janie?” She is understandably very angry and Reeve is terrible. I don’t remember if she forgives him. But. Point being. There’s a whole book about Reeve being a terrible boyfriend if you’re interested.
I man, I love the idea of people naming their kids after whatever happens to be fashionable that year. “Hi, I’m Neon and this is my older brother Colourblock.” “So – you two were born in 2010 and 2013, right? Pleased to meet you!”
“That’s my cousin Fringe, she’s a little odd though, we don’t talk about it.”
I imagine a kid coming home from the first day of kindergarten to tell their parents that there are five other Ombres in the class.
Peplum is graduating from preschool this month!
Singer Toni Braxton’s kids are named Denim and Diezel. So, it happens.
I think she does because he is present in the fourth and fifth books? Ugh SET REEVE ON FIRE HE IS THE WORST.
I never got any farther than The Voice on the Radio because I was too mad at Reeve for deciding that the obvious way to cover the fact that he’s a terrible radio personality who did nothing to prepare for his first time on the air is to exploit his girlfriend’s private life without letting her know. And then keep doing it.
. . . . Clearly even like fifteen years later, I’m still mad about this book. Despite not having thought about it much again until this morning.
I know! He couldn’t even like, change the names of the people involved?
I mean, he could have. But that’s foresight. And this is Reeve. Reeve who got compared to an impulsive puppy more than a reasoning functioning human, from what I remember. Sigh. *is tempted to put together a list of worst boyfriends from YA novels of the 80s and 90s*
Please do it!
You totally should!
YES YES YES DO IT
Do it and then pitch it to The Toast, because A) AWESOME and B) the comment thread would be EPIC
HOW MANY OF THESE BOOKS ARE THERE, JESUS.
Seriously, I didn’t know there was a third and now your’e saying there are five?
SAME. I thought it was just the two and I was legit obsessed with these and to this day feel peanut butter sandwiches DO need milk after.
.. .there’s a fifth book? After What Janie Found? :blink:
Yep! Reeve and Janie decide to get married and there are magically iPads so continuity is…not a thing.
Ugh, she IS pressured to forgive him, after bio fam likens his exploitation to Janie’s emotional distance from the Springs. I believe they basically call her “a brat,” because not being immediately demonstrative to your parent-strangers in the aftermath of discovering your kidnapping is a super bratty thing.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat.
1. Those two things should not be likened.
2. I remember them basically blaming her for not being instantly assimilated like she’d never left and acting like they had been a family forever and, dude, that is deeply uncool.
Uuugh, apparently they get married. Yech. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/child…
Janie no you deserve better
Nooooo! How tragic.
Janie, why?
Ooooh man, was just about to comment on that WEIRD third installment. I was so confused by that book, because I never anything like that on the radio before in my life and I was like who would listen to some dude’s ramblings??? When I got older I finally heard Joe Frank and my first though was THIS is what Reeve’s show must have sounded like!
And then I felt really bad for all the women who show up in Joe Frank’s stories.
Well, I mean, Serial is a thing, so.
Wait wait wait…hold up. There’s more than 2 books? How did I never know this?
THERE ARE FIVE AND THEY’RE ALL AWFUL
I only read the first four! I need to find the next one to torture myself with.
Me, too! I did not know about the fifth one and I HATED the ending to the fourth so now I have to go find it!
No, don’t. It suffers from distantly-written-sequel syndrome and is AWFUL. You should always be dubious about a sequel written a decade after the series ostensibly “ended”.
Likewise, never read: The 4th Pit Dragon book, the 4th Dragon’s Milk book, any of the later Ender’s Game books.
…. I was super into those Pit Dragon books, I may have to track this down despite the warnings! (Then again, I truly enjoyed the Ender’s Game sequels, so I may just have terrible taste for bad sequels?)
Same here!
I just remembered that the other friend that wasn’t Sarah-Charlotte was named Adair O’Dell. Why has my subconscious been holding onto that for me.
The Voice on the Radio might be one of my earlier you-can’t-go-home memories, because I read it well after the first two books in the series and I was so excited that there was a third book and it was so awful.
I do remember that! I devoured all of these books. I think I remember wishing that a book called “The Voice on the Radio” would be a lot more spooky and mysterious, I think I felt let down by it? There wasn’t really any big mystery except the mystery of “why are straight men so terrible?”
Edit: Apparently I didn’t devour all of these books because THERE ARE TWO MORE THAT I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT AND NOW I WANT TO READ THIS WHOLE SERIES AGAIN.
Really, isn’t that the greatest mystery of our time, though?
It’s like he made Serial, but without any journalistic ethics.
BRB, off to write a mashup of this and “Welcome to Night Vale”.
She does forgive him because there is a 5th book where she marries him or something.
I loved The Voice on the Radio! I mean, it was terrible, but compelling. Reeve was such a dick.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha I was going to ask if this was the “denim and lace” book. She wanted TWINS, not just two kids, right? What’s the obsession with twins, anyway? Wow.
“a less annoying virgin of Reeve.”
I am going to assume this is deliberate and not a typo/spellcheck quirk, because it is perfect.
God, I thought these books were so cool when I was a kid. Now? Shudder. Also, why does no one take any of these people to get professional help? They all need serious therapy. Group therapy, couples therapy, individual therapy, all of the therapy. You have been through a lot, get the help that you need.
Nitpick: the police officer wasn’t talking to Janie. It was to the Useless Duo, Jodie and Stephen.
YES I love this so much. The only other useful person in this saga was Reeve’s competent as hell older sister — I wanna say Laura? — who was a lawyer and just got shit done without forcing emotional hangups on everyone.
Run away with Laura, Janie. Start anew.
IIRC, even Laura messed up and mistakenly told people that the police wouldn’t investigate if Janie’s bio parents didn’t press charges, or something like that. But she was still in law school and not a full-fledged lawyer, so it’s an understandable mistake.
Lizzie! And Reeve didn’t like her, I think, but yeah, at least she did things. What I remember most about her is that she’s described as being “think in the way of women who are too busy to eat lunch” and later Janie sees her nibbling at one grape.
LIZZIE
hahaha
yeah I have a vague recollection of everyone hating her cause she was mean and professional and that made me like her all the more (not enough to remember her name though…)
Lizzie was clearly a feminazi stereotype and I adored her for it.
*thin
Why do I have this overwhelming feeling that I definitely read this, and yet have no recollection of actually reading it?
More importantly, does the girl on the carton look more like Ginnifer Goodwin or Sara Rue?
I am also fairly certain that I’ve read the book, but I cannot recall a single plot point from it.
I just
I don’t
GET OUT OF MY HEAD, MALLORY
Yes! I was just thinking “That’s so weird, there was a thread about this series going on…”
and then I was like…it probably makes sense that Mallory reads comments on her own site, yes.
Yeah, if it’s not a pitch, I think if it’s on her site, it’s up for grabs.
I remember also being SUPER fascinated by how she had every type of pajama, including teddies which I had never heard of before. My mother was scandalized when I asked her what it looked like. I desperately wanted one to sleep in when I was 10.
i am so here for this. i have a lot of feelings, but my most prominent memory is 11 year old me being super embarrassed when my grandma picked it up to read and dreading her getting to the making out in the raked leaves chapter, so that she’d know i was reading a romance kind of book. and it’s hilarious now, to think of me being embarrassed by that because my grandmother has always been one of the most vocal sex-positive people i’ve ever met, and she started indoctrinating me with sex-positivism well before i got to middle school. oh, puberty.
Does anyone remember a book that had a very similar plot but slightly different? The main character had been kidnapped by her father and was living with her Dad and stepmom. She sees herself on a TV special and calls it in.
Then she has to go back and live with her Mom and stepdad and awful siblings.
whoops just posted about that same book! I don’t recall the title, though.
Apparently it’s a sub-genre!!
Twice Taken! not nearly as good tbh
Thank you for the title!
Thank you!! No, it wasn’t as good, but it stuck in my head more.
Oh, and there was also another one called Taking Terri Mueller. I didn’t realize until now that this was sort of a genre?
I always get these books confused with another “girl was a missing child” book. In the other one, the girl saw a photo of her younger self on TV and called the number for missing children. No milk cartons involved. I get her story confused with Janie’s story and I don’t know which way is up with these Missing Kid books.
Is this the one where she somehow ends up on the lam and thinks she’s wanted for murder? And the villain hacks her email account and writes to her dad and she’s SO SURE that her dad has fallen for it because the hacker imitated her signature all-lowercase email writing style?
The thing that stuck out the most to me was Janie’s collection of Swatches, and how that was a marker of class/bonding item with her adoptive mom that her bio siblings did not react well to.
hahaha I was going to mention the color-coordinated swatches.
Also the cake decorating class and the eventual homecoming game cake.
I remember reading that book when I was 10 and watching the movie and thinking every adult in Jamie’s life had basically failed her. Then I got older and realized adults fail kids quite a lot in real life, not just fiction.
Though I did love the part where Janie signs one of her papers Jayyne Johnstone and her teacher gives the assignment back asking, “are you having an identity crisis or something?” ACTUALLY YES.
oh my god, apparently the Johnstone name thing is the ONLY thing I remember from this book??? I knew I’d read it but everything else was drawing a blank.
JAYYNE
DOWN WITH REEVE
AND ALSO HER ENTIRE BIO FAMILY they are all jerks except the twins the twins were chill af
I loved these books deeply deeply deeply but a few years ago a new book in the series was published and it was AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL and a deep betrayal to all the characters’ personalities as developed through the original books and I have never forgiven Caroline B. Cooney.
I’ve been eyeing that book on my kindle bookstore and considering downloading it for YEARS but I never have and I feel like I must have sensed this would be the case.
God Reeve you are the WORST
Honestly though Janie doesn’t get off the hook for me with that whole Denim and Lace thing.
Thank you for reminding me there was a movie of this it’s all coming back to me now A+++
I always HATED her bio family and thought I was the only one this is the best thread EVER.
Also Caroline B Cooney is still writing new books, she wrote one where tweeting your friends for help during an emergency is a major plot point and it’s so, so bad.
I read most of her books as a youth, and I felt very *rebellious* doing so what with all the second base encounters and occasional recreational drug use. I’m so grateful my parents didn’t prescreen the books I read.
I remember feeling scandalous in middle school for reading the Tamora Pierce books, what with all of their vague allusions to characters having sex.
Although the most mind-blowing part of that was how much of a NBD the sex ended up being in Alanna’s books. It was like one line, tucked away in the middle of a paragraph of ‘and time passed’.
I still remember how horrified I was when I realized these characters were going to have SEX and my grandma was RIGHT HERE IN THE SAME ROOM and maybe if I sunk into the corner of the couch far enough she wouldn’t notice because it must be GLARINGLY OBVIOUS what I was reading. D:
VC Andrews! Nothing else ever came close.
It seems like there were so many authors writing the same things at the time, but I definitely read Freeze Tag. The melodrama – not to mention people with names like West – was much easier to digest considering that the central plot device was a girl with supernatural ice powers.
I liked her series about kids who lived on an island, and then were suddenly forced to leave and go to this creepy school on the mainland. I wish I could remember what it’s called, because it delivers on the creep factor that everyone though Face on the Milk Carton was going to have.
Oh, and I think she wrote a time travel series that was kind of goofy, but excellent (and featured a male lead named Strath).
The first one is the Losing Cristina series (starts with Fog). I liked that one too!
!!! I read 1 book of the time travel series and still kind of want to find the rest – I remember being super confused that this was the same author as the Milk Carton book (I have still not read any of the Janie books, but I remember picking up the first one so many times to just look at random pages for some reason.)
Strat! Short for Hiram Stratton Junior.
Both Sides of Time! I loved those books!
This book and the book series about the girl who had cancer haunted me. I never read either of them, but they were there on every bookshelf from elementary to middle school.
Was it just me, or were there rather a lot of books in the 80s-90s about teens or their parents dying of cancer? Or did I just think that because my older sister was going through a maudlin phase and read them and I read whatever was lying around?
Oh yeah, that was definitely a thing! I went through a phase around age 10 where I read a lot of “teens with cancer” books and fictional Holocaust narratives of teens hiding from the Nazis.
Wow. After looking at your blog, I’m *reasonably* sure you’re not my IRL sister, but you sound close enough that I have my doubts. I’d totally forgotten that she was really into teens-hiding-from-the-Holocaust historical fiction at the time, and even tried her hand at some Anne Frank fanfic.
Your sister was more dedicated than I was! The most I ever did was name one of my dolls after the main character’s dead sister from Number the Stars.
I also seriously considered wearing a Star of David necklace in 5th grade despite the fact that I was not even slightly Jewish, but even my stupid ass knew that was probably not appropriate.
There were SO MANY and they all had the same wispy pastel cover
Lurlene McDaniel! She had a bazillion books and they were all titled something like “Six Months Until I Die”
Six months to live! Which is the first in a four book series. OMG I read all of these books and sobbed because I had a lot of feelings as a tween and there is just something about imaging yourself in those kind of harrowing situations. “Baby Alicia is Dying” was a favorite of mine and the short series with the Amish.
Oh man, remember the part with her Amish boyfriend and the sleeping bags? That was a very important scene for me.
OMG. That series with the girl who gets the heart from the guy’s sister and then starts dating the guy, or considers dating him, or something–I was INTO IT. But I remember nothing 😀
Is that a YA adaptation of Return To Me???
Apparently the book came out in ’92, so if anything, the movie borrowed the theme from it.
That would be the second movie that blatantly ripped off a 90s YA novel that I’m aware of (the other being The Village/Running Out of Time)!
It’s like Lifetime TV for the tween set!
YES! THAT WAS SHE!
I read way too many of these when I was about 12 – I like to find an author and then read everything I can get my hands on of their books, which really doesn’t work for people like McDaniel churning out 20+ books like this. I then gave them all to my younger cousin (I’m not sure why, I hope its because she wanted to read them) and I remember my aunt saying something about “Caitlin is enjoying those depressing books you gave her.”
Teenagers Dying of Cancer was a very popular genre.
You misremembering of that title is Best Thing.
Yes! There were so many of these books. A friend and I refer to them, collectively, as “Sixteen and Cancer”
I can’t tell if it’s better or worse than the current YA trend of dystopian fantasy revolving around a girl who is somehow special and must fight off some evil entity. I have not read Hunger Games or Divergent or The Mortal Instruments (or seen any of the movies) so if my general amalgamation is off, I apologize.
But really, can’t YA books just be about normal coming-of-age stuff? Not everyone is dealing with death constantly.
Also suicides. My daughter asked me for some hedgehog book? And the “if i leave” book. It is so hard to watch my kid go through this stage! Tweens.
We called them the “I’m going to die books.” Lurlene McDaniel wrote a ton of them and one of my friends read them all. They were all about dying being in the hospital, and if you would get kissed by your love, before you breathed your last. All when you were in highschool.
http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/2154.Lurlene_M…
I liked the the L.J. Smith Night World ones better where if you did die of cancer, you got to come back as a kick ass vampire. (And not have weird physic, blood drinking baby like Twilight.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._J._Smith_%28auth…
I get these books super mixed-up with another book about a girl whose mom marries a cheesy salesman and they move to Salt Lake City and are stifled by Mormons and there’s a cute guy. I bring this up in part because does anyone know what book I’m talking about? And what the plot is? Because I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with kidnapping, so I don’t know why it’s linked to poor Janie’s melodrama in my mind.
Oh my gosh, yeah! I remember reading that book as a middle schooler, because I grew up Mormon and I was interested to see if they got it right (not really, apart from the love of multi-level marketing schemes in the Mormon Corridor), but I couldn’t tell you what it was called.
Where It Stops, Nobody Knows! i own this book (or did, at one point). When they’re in Utah, the girl enrolls at Mount Logan Middle School, which is a real school my aunt teaches at. I think it was written by the sister of someone my aunt taught with?
Oh, no, wait, that can’t be right. I don’t think her mom is/gets married in that book. But she is a stolen baby.
“but this is not a book about Doing It for the first time…”
… I really thought that’s what this book was about.
Same, the hotel plot point was really pivotal to 13-year-old me.
WAIT important question:
has Jaya read this book yet?
I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE. I have been thinking about this book for a million years and been angry at it and now I know why.
Did any other adopted Toasties read/watch this and have a weird relationship with it? I watched the TV movie with my mom when I was maybe ten years old and I remember her being very adamant that the True Parents were the old-as-hell couple and the bio family was just, like, ruining everything, and sure they weren’t maliciously evil but they were still Wrong and there just wasn’t any room in that interpretation for the grey area of “Everybody done messed up, all adults are awful, life is weird” which is basically where the entire story takes place.
*waves hand frantically* Me! I did! Me!
I never saw the movie, but I read the books like they were a guilty secret and was terrified that my adoptive parents would see me reading them and give me some iteration on the we-are-you-only-real-family lecture. Also, that books basically crushed any “maybe my birth family is secretly wonderful and we will find one another* fantasies I may have harbored.
So it turns out I did not invent adding the y’s to my name or wanting to name children Denim and Lace. I seriously though 12 year old me came up with that on my own.
Guys, I was obsessed with her “disaster” books as a kid. Especially the plane crash one and the one set in the ER. They were like crack.
The one set in the ER! That one has a scene early on with, like, an eight year old that is babysitting her younger siblings and she brings them to the ER waiting room and makes up that her baby brother has an earache or something, just because she literally has nowhere else to go, and the admitting nurse gives her a look like, “I know exactly what your game is missy but lucky for you I could not care less” and tells her it’s gonna be like a five hour wait and the eight year old is like PERFECT and that scene has stuck with me forever. The rest of the book is dust in my memory (does one of the kids get shot for some reason?).
I have read and subsequently forgotten so many Caroline B Cooney books. I just read through a list of all her books on Wikipedia and I definitely read like half of them at least, maybe more, but here’s a near-complete list of everything else I remember from all of them:
-One book had a girl with tri-colored hair (blonde/brunette/silver? Or maybe red was one of them? Silver was definitely in there) and she was correctly VERY proud of it but she overhears her evil principal call it ugly at one point
-Evil twin at a ski resort? I think the evil one dies and the good one takes her place for some reason and she starts to appreciate exactly how evil her evil twin was. Maybe her evil twin and her boyfriend would drive losers into alleys and kick them out of the car and laugh while rats attacked them.
-What Child Is This I think was about a sad adorable foster kid. Her foster parents were also fostering a teen boy, and bribing him to do his math homework with brownies? and he was convinced they’d like having an angelic little foster girl and dump him but then they were like, “this isn’t working out, let’s stick with bribing teen boys with brownies and kick the perfect angel out” but I don’t remember them having any reason for thinking things ‘weren’t working out’
-I really liked the Time Travelers Quartet (which was only a trilogy when I read it) but I only remember the third one, which was about a girl from the past going to the 90’s right before being forced to marry some old guy, but then in the end she goes back and everyone just assumed her evil dad had locked her away the whole time and her fiancé was actually really worried about her so she’s like, “Oh maybe this’ll work after all” and marries him.
-A pretty girl goes to NYC and trips or something and declares she has amnesia to a crowd on the street and then some rich sinister guy is like “you’re my daughter” and she just goes with it even though SPOILER ALERT the twist is she never had amnesia at all she was just foolin’ because she’s an aspiring actress. Pretty sure she has to jump off a yacht and swim for her life at one point, but it all works out and the end is she goes on a date with the hot guy to listen to that orchestra that plays all of John Williams’ stuff.
The Time Travelers books were the only Caroline B. Cooney (that ‘B’ feels very important somehow) that I read as a kid and now I DESPERATELY want to re-read them.
YES. The girl with the tri-colored hair is in a trilogy of books called Fog, Snow, and Fire, and the evil twins book is called Twins, and the amnesia-but-not-really one is called Unforgettable, and I’ve read so many Caroline B. Cooney books and now that Mallory has posted about her we can all finally talk about it!
LOVED THOSE.
Flight #116 is Down!
Also, Emergency Room (that was really the name of the book), was a total obsession at the end of fifth grade. My best friend and I used all the plotlines in the book as a way to imagine horrible disaster scenarios for characters in our weird, soapy melodramas. (Well, that and R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike. Once we stopped imagining ourselves as princesses our imaginary play got a little bit weird.) Pregnant teens and dead motorcyclists are very scandalous when you’re turning 11.
Also, did you read Cooney’s Wanted? A teenage girl comes home to find her father murdered and then ends up on the run, convinced that the police think she did it. I loved it.
THE PLANE CRASH ONE. That haunts me so much.
I remember she wrote a “timely” one about a mother who has to serve in the Gulf War because she’s in the army reserves and I mostly hated all the characters but also felt guilty about that. Also, the mom’s name was Rosalys, pronounced “Rose Alice” and the youngest kid kept saying “Stay alert. The world needs more lerts.”
I always remember the one where the kids run a stop sign and kill the young mom. Oh, and the one about the girl who falls in love with a rock. And ‘Don’t Blame the Music’, and ‘Freeze Tag’ and ‘The Girl Who Invented Romance’ and ‘Perfume’…
THE STOP SIGN ONE.
Driver’s Ed.
I also loved the mummy-stealing one.
Oh my gosh, the ER one made me terrified to go to a city because I was afraid I would just get hit by a stray bullet like the girl in that book.
Janie’s bio-family imprinted on me firmly that people who have Shower Limits are the worst kind of evil. After everything she went through she can’t even have 10 min in the bathroom?!
Never was I so glad to be an only child! I definitely identified with Janie (except I was an only child Catholic, so yeah…). The thought of shower limits was horrifying to me.
haha especially because she had so much hair!
When my mom was a kid, their neighbors’ Dad would only let his kids use two squares of toilet paper each.
So, maybe not QUITE the worst kind of evil…
I think about the shower thing all the time.
CAROLINE B. COONEY
holy shit.
so i’m combing through her wikipedia page (which like, omg, this lady was PROLIFIC), trying to find this book that i read over and over as a kid. it may have been from the “Time Travelers Quartet”?? i mostly just remember that there was a hot guy but he was also kind of…rotting? like maybe he was a ghost that was sometimes more like a body than a ghost? or maybe he was evil and that’s why he was decaying?
i honestly remember very little about this book except the shiver of repulsion and amazement that i got from the idea of a sentient corpse
YES! I remember that series! There’s the girl who falls through time to Gilded Age New York City, and ends up falling in love with Stratton, the eldest son of a reasonably wealthy family who is supposed to get engaged to Harriet, a plain-but-nice girl who is richer than God (but ends up dying of TB). There’s a fortune-hunting villain who first tries to get Harriet, and then Stratton’s sister (Devony, who in a different book meets Main Character’s brother in the present and then goes back to her own time to marry a British aristocrat, a la Edith Wharton’s “The Buccaneers”), and it’s all very complicated and emotionally overwrought.
yeah. this series sounds awesome from what i was reading on wikipedia and your much-more-spirited-and-effective summary, and now i want to read it, but i’m afraid it is not the book i was thinking of, which had maybe like a modern-day girl who falls in love with a vaguely rotty civil war ghost?? the name “both sides of time” sounds SO familiar to me though.
aw, I never read past the first book and always hoped Harriet got a happily-ever-after. I liked her more than the rest of the characters.
Out of Time taught me all I know about TB.
Ah, I love that one, it’s called The Stranger! The main girl (named NICOLETTA omg so beautiful) has lost her soprano slot in the school choir, but who cares about high school popularity when there’s a mysterious cursed boy who quietly loves you??
Maybe “The Stranger”? He fell into a cave and died there and then the cave was sentient so he reassembled himself like Swamp Thing but with a hot-boy glamour over top of it, and went to high school and a girl got a crush on him, but he couldn’t ever really leave the cave because his dead rotting corpse was still in there?
The best thing about that one is that it started out with a bunch of drama surrounding the Madrigals Club, and you thought it was going to be about Madrigals, but it was just about how the girl got kicked out of Madrigals because there was a better soprano at their school now and so she had to take a dumb art class instead and that’s where she met Jethro the Hot Undead Cave Corpse.
Caroline Cooney is the greatest, is what I’m saying.
that is definitely not what i’m thinking of but it sounds fanfuckingtastic. keep the possibilities coming people i’ll just be over here compiling a list of bizarre zombie erotica aimed at 11 year olds
Whoa.
I spent YEARS trying to track down this book before someone on the-Toast-dot-net enlightened me – I had misremembered him as being some sort of rock or tree man. And in the end, he like crawls back into his cave to be dead-dead, right?
I read a book titled The Talisman that had a scene like that, and it would have fit perfectly well next to Cooney’s books. (Perhaps you remember a scene in which the heroine is terrorized by a bunch of haunted night lights?)
Unfortunately, search results for “The Talisman” are swamped by the Stephen King book and various other unrelated paranormal romance tales, and I cannot determine the authorship of the book I’m thinking of. I would recognize the cover instantly, though.
Aha! It was Cameron Dokey! I think. (I tried a site search on fantasticfiction dot com . Still can’t find an image of the cover, but that sounds about right.)
This seems like the place to cast for the name of a forgotten 80s YA favorite of mine.
The premise is a rich and beautiful teen girl who is gifted a red Porsche for her sweet sixteen and then has to do some community service with old people? And the old people don’t like the bucket seats of her sweet ride. And she learns a lesson, I think. Anyone?
hahahahahahahahahahaahaha
wait wait wait wait wait
What was Janie’s birth name again? It wasn’t Janie and her bio mom wouldn’t stop calling her that name instead of Janie.
Jennie! Or Jenny, IDK
I remember that! Wikipedia says it was “Jennie.”
Jennie Spring!
Jodie had the WEIRDEST mood swings around Janie. Like remember the scene where they’re all hanging out playing Nintendo and bonding and having a great time and then Stephen brings out chocolate chip cookies and Janie hesitates to take one because she’s having a weird missing-her-parents moment and has tensed up again and Jodie THROWS THE PLATE OF COOKIES ACROSS THE ROOM AND SCREAMS AT HER. Like, I get that you’re a teenage girl, Jodie, but Janie didn’t even SAY anything, she just got a weird look on her face, and every single adult in your life and also every single one of your teen girl friends has attempted to explain to you that Janie is having a traumatic experience and is effectively bereaved and having an identity crisis at the same time, so maybe try to chill the fuck out for one second when she gets a look on her face that isn’t “oh the joy of belonging to this new random family I never heard of”?
Stephen too, but mostly Jodie. Every time Janie said the slightest thing about pizza or horseback riding lessons Jodie would be like “I HOPE YOU DIE IN A FIRE, YOU SPOILED BRAT” and then when Janie went back to Frank and Miranda Jodie was like “WHY?” Gee, Jodie, I can’t imagine, why wouldn’t anyone want to share a room with you?
All of us collectively shitting on Reeve is everything I have ever dreamed of. REEVE YOU ARE A GARBAGE PERSON. GO HOME AND MASTURBATE.
Also I was just telling someone about this book two nights ago and the timing of this is making me feel toastily, synergistically fabulous.
Same! I was describing it to my cousin last week.
I needed something like this so much today. Hail Mallory!
And yes, I just wanted to shake so many people. And Reeve’s obnoxious law student sister (Lizzy? Libby?).
Also, I already side-eye Janie’s biological parents for their bizarro naming scheme.
And pretty much every adult for not suggesting some therapy, maybe.
The one twin brother was kind of okay, though. The non-athletic one? Brian or Brandon with an o or something?
Also Voice on the Radio Reeve is THE WORST. Followed by Frank in What Janie Found. Assholes.
Also, does anyone remember a book about a girl who was possessed or haunted by her unborn evil twin or something? All I really remember was that she called the parents “the maternal unit” and “the paternal unit” and at age 9 or whatever, I was like “what a brilliant use of language to convey her Eeevil unattachedness.”
Also, there’s a book called The Juniper Game which I don’t think is by Caroline B. Cooney but always reminded me of her in a weird way, and my copy mysteriously disappeared? So my most vivid memory is a conversation between Beautiful Psychic Juniper and the shlubby boy with a massive boner for her that she has drawing her past lives or whatever, where she’s going out with her boyfriend, but says she won’t kiss him; shlubby boy tries to be cool and says he thought she believed in living dangerously; she says “but not enough to kiss [super obnoxious preppy asshole name boyfriend] with a cold sore.” And when I read it, I just thought she meant because she thought it was gross, and literally years later I was sitting bored in class and it popped into my head “wait, was that a herpes reference?”
The unborn evil twin one is called “The Perfume” and the alive girl is Dove and the evil twin’s name is Wing and she’s secretly Egyptian, I believe.
This post and the comments thereon are making me uncomfortably aware of how much of my brain space is apparently dedicated to the plot details of Caroline B. Cooney books.
Same. I have large chunks of them just in my head, forever.
omg, I loved The Juniper Game when I was in junior high.
The Juniper Game ahhhhhh I still think about it!!!
When the car goes off the road & she thinks it’s medieval karma trying to drown her as a witch!!!!!
Y’know, growing up I don’t think I ever encountered another book with the nerve to call out Super Mario World (and even specifically the Vanilla Dome) by name. The tale is oddly singular in that fragment of verisimilitude; any other book would, at best, just make something up entirely.
I remember this despite forgetting entirely about the pile-of-leaves thing. Oh well.
REEVE. GUY. I KNOW YOUR FACE IS SYMMETRICAL AND YOU’RE EXCITED ABOUT GETTING TO SHAVE
That bit where Reeve goes on and on about his Shaving Thoughts is bizarre. Do teenage boys really get that excited about shaving? I’ve shaved my legs and it did not make me feel cool and adult; it was annoying.
I read so many Caroline B Cooney books as a child/teenager, and I loved them. Summer Love! Among Friends! The Party’s Over! The writing was often terrible, but that was just part of the charm. (Also, they offered such a fascinating view of 80s/90s American middle-class high school life to a reader in the UK from about 2000 onwards. I suspected that they didn’t bear that much of a resemblence to reality – the series she wrote revolving around school dances seemed particularly alien – but I loved it anyway.)
The New York City police officer who points to a random homeless woman and tells Janie that LIFE has probably punished Hannah enough
Isn’t it just Jodie and Stephen who are in New York looking for Hannah, not Janie?
If I learned anything from Leave it to Beaver (other than don’t buy mail order baby alligators) it’s that shaving is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING to a fresh-faced young lad beginning to enter Manhood.
For people who want more in this genre, I humbly submit Where It Stops, Nobody Knows by Amy Ehrlich which I LOVED as a kid and still have parts of memorized, I think.
YAAAAASSSSS That was my FAVORITE!
My middle-school bestie and I used the term “reeve” as a placeholder for “sex” when we were afraid someone was eavesdropping or reading over our shoulders.
I loved those books as a kid but I always used to get mad at Jodie and Stephen and the Spring parents for just expecting Janie to assimilate into the family when Janie a) had been raised by other people and b) didn’t even get a TRANSITION period. Just, hey, you get dropped off at your actual-parents’ house, have no contact with the people who raised you, go from being an only child to one of five siblings in a house with ONE BATHROOM and you start at a new school in TENTH GRADE under what is essentially a brand-new identity and everybody will call you “Jennie” instead of the name you’ve been almost your whole life.
And then they got mad at her for being “selfish” when she chose to go back to her adoptive parents. SHE’S A KID, HOLY SHIT. They all needed therapy.
Other awful characters: Jodie’s best friend Nicole (I think) who felt that it was appropriate to keep asking Janie exactly what it was like to be kidnapped and why she didn’t try to escape; Kathy (again, I think), Stephen’s college girlfriend who insisted on referring to Janie as “the kidnapette”. So many people in these books have no empathy.
I just remember, as a kid, being super righteously-indignant about how Janie’s bio-siblings treated her. If I recall correctly, she was kidnapped after wandering off at a shoe store. The siblings basically said that she was an incredibly selfish child, and probably wandered off on purpose, and this was treated like a serious point, and not a ludicrous thing to say about a three-year-old. Yes Jodie, toddlers are responsible for their own kidnappings.
Oh shit, is “I can’t respect that” a Candice Cody reference? If Mallory is a survivor fan I need to know right now….
I didn’t realize I had been waiting my ENTIRE LIFE for this article!!!! Oh also FUCK Reeve for like capitalizing on Janie’s story for his dumbfuck radio show. He was clickbait before there was clickbait
#Denimandlaceforever
Hey Loren, i played a character in that movie. No one famous but I am credited on imdb. I want to wish you a speedy and healthy recovery, and I hope you will be able to find a copy of this movie! Much love
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