How could the King tell which of the two women was the real mother? Split the baby in half, he said, and each of you take half. But in a sermon at the church where I was then organist, the minister retold the story of King Solomon, who was faced with two women, each claiming to be the mother of the same child. I did not mean to write a second book about Janie. I wanted you to have to go on worrying about Janie, just as those real life parents had to go on worrying about their lost child.

Over the years, many of you have written to me about the ending of Face on the Milk Carton, which does not tell you what you want to know. You recognize yourself on a missing child poster. Right away, I thought: what a great idea for a book. I got on my plane, weepy from thinking about those parents, and thought-actually, there is one person who might recognize the photo. The mother and father will never find her. Can you imagine? Those parents got up that morning with their stack of posters and their roll of Scotch tape and drove into New York still hoping that if a hundred thousand people came through the airport, one of them would recognize that little girl, and tell the parents where she is now?īut no one can recognize a child fifteen years later from her three year old picture. When I went up close and read the type beneath the photo, I found that she had been missing for fifteen years.

On that day, the concourse was plastered with home-made missing child posters, each with a grainy picture of a very small child, maybe three years old. It’s a New York City airport and it’s immense. The Face on the Milk Carton, first of the Janie books, is the book you wonder about most. Tennessee Volunteer State Book Award Winner 1994-1995 Texas Lone Star 1991-1992 South Dakota Young Adult Reading List 1991-1992 Illinois Rebecca Caudill Young Readers' Book Award Nominee 1993 #29 of the Top 100 Banned & Challenged Books 2000-2009 (ALA)Ĭalifornia Young Reader Medal Nominee 1993Ĭolorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award 1996 Johnson really Janie's parents? And if not, who is Janie Johnson, and what really happened?

Janie can't believe that her loving parents kidnapped her, but as she begins to piece things together, nothing makes sense. She recognized that little girl-it was she. But as Janie Johnson glanced at the face of the ordinary little girl with her hair in tight pigtails, wearing a dress with a narrow white collar-a three-year-old who had been kidnapped twelve years before from a shopping mall in New Jersey-she felt overcome with shock. No one ever really paid close attention to the faces of the missing children on the milk cartons.

Janie face on the milk carton