Immediately I said, “It’s Janie and her kidnap mother, Miranda. Janie has stumbled on old family files. She discovers that her father Frank has always known where their kidnapper daughter, Hannah, is and in fact, he’s been sending her support checks all these years.” That idea became What Janie Found.
I loved writing these books. In spite of the darkness of the central theme—kidnapping—the Janie books provided a lot of fun. I sponsored my son-in-law’s race car, and we reproduced the cover of The Face on the Milk Carton on the hood of his car. As far as we knew, we had the only book race car out there. One evening, The Face on the Milk Carton was a question on Jeopardy! That book also became a TV movie starring Kellie Martin. For my movie party, so I would have favors to give out, a middle school in Indiana made dozens of pretend missing-children half-pint milk cartons, using their own school pictures. For Halloween, I used to wear a big puffy milk carton over my head, with a cut-out so that I was the face.
Twenty years after I wrote The Face on the Milk Carton, Beverly asked me to write an e-original short story about Janie and Reeve. “Janie has been in high school in all four books,” she said. “Reeve has been in college since the second book. But make them adults. I think millions of your fans want to know what happened to them. And it has to be a thriller, as well.” What a great idea!
I hurled myself at every character mentioned in all four books. I wrote little tiny stories about what each one would be doing. It was time, I realized, to give my readers the two things they wanted: a wedding and a capture.
I called Beverly. “How about I write a fifth book instead of a short story?”
So now we have both the fifth book—Janie Face to Face—and the e-original short story—What Janie Saw.
There are still missing-child posters and I still weep for heartbroken parents. But in the Janie books, love and integrity save two families and create a new one. I thank all my readers who fell in love with this story and gave me the privilege of following Janie and Reeve into their new lives.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caroline B. Cooney is the author of the following books for young people: The Lost Songs; Three Black Swans; They Never Came Back; If the Witness Lied; Diamonds in the Shadow; A Friend at Midnight; Hit the Road; Code Orange; The Girl Who Invented Romance; Family Reunion; Goddess of Yesterday (an ALA-ALSC Notable Children’s Book); The Ransom of Mercy Carter; Tune In Anytime; Burning Up; The Face on the Milk Carton (an IRA-CBC Children’s Choice Book) and its companions, Whatever Happened to Janie? and The Voice on the Radio (each of them an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults), What Janie Found, What Janie Saw, an ebook original story, and Janie Face to Face; What Child Is This? (an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults); Driver’s Ed (an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults and a Booklist Editors’ Choice); Among Friends; Twenty Pageants Later; and the Time Travel Quartet: Both Sides of Time, Out of Time, Prisoner of Time, and For All Time, which are also available as The Time Travelers, Volumes I and II. Caroline B.
Cooney lives in South Carolina.
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