Notes on the Face on the Milk Carton
I had forgotten this book existed. I remember its ubiquity in elementary school. I swear that at all times, at least one of my classmates was reading this book while at least one more read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I never read The Face on the Milk Carton, although I’m not certain why, as I can recall reading other Caroline B. Cooney books.
I was reminded of The Face on the Milk Carton—or, as I continually misremember the title, The Girl with the Face on the Milk Carton—while researching banned books to add to our little free library in honor of Banned Books Week. I found a used copy online and ordered it.
The cover of the book about the face on the milk carton.
This book is… strange. I understand why it was such a hit. It’s addictive, fast-paced, and the basic premise is so compelling that I knew I’d make it to the end. A genuine page turner, even if there are a few things I couldn’t stand about it.
One of those things I couldn’t stand: it seems as if the author never settled on certain details, things that in an ordinary book might be extremely important, details like “how old is the main character”. One other detail that really frustrated me was a throwaway anecdote early in the book. We hear about a time when Janie, the main character, was a bridesmaid in a wedding at the age of 12. Whose wedding? We don’t find out. Why did she have a close enough relationship with a woman being married to be in the wedding party? Not explained. The only thing we learn is that she danced all night and there was a fun photograph from the wedding framed on their wall.
To make this throwaway anecdote weirder, her parents appear to have very few friends and no family, so why was she at a wedding to begin with, much less in the wedding? Did weddings work differently in the 90s? Did anyone get to be a bridesmaid in the 90s? Were these relatives? We learn by the end of the book that there’s no way it was the wedding of a family member because Janie’s parents are fugitives.
Also, her parents are fugitives, we learn. Not fugitives from the law, though.
Nope: fugitives from the Hare Krishnas.
(Warning: here come the spoilers for The Girl on the Milk Carton.)
Were the Hare Krishnas an Evil Cult?
I don’t know, but they certainly are in the Caroline B. Cooney universe.
About halfway through the book, we learn that Janie’s ostensible birth mother—who later turns out not to be her birth mother at all, but just a stranger who kidnapped her and then delivered her to her adopted parents, who weren’t adopted parents at all, or grandparents, but unwitting kidnapping accomplices—was brainwashed by the Hare Krishna movement.
Feast your eyes on this, provided via dialogue by Janie’s fake/adopted mother/grandmother:
A cult is a religious group with exceedingly strict rules for the people who join it. The Hare Krishna movement swept America like a prairie fire in the sixties and seventies… She met a group of young people who told her that if she became a Hare Krishan, she would be purified…
I have never met someone in the Hare Krishna movement, but this book is the first time I’ve heard them described as a cult. I suppose it makes sense that a suburban Connecticut mother in the 90s could characterize them that way, whether or not that’s objectively true. It continues:
They were scary people. They wore bright yellow robes, the men shaved their heads, they carried bowls and begged. You saw them everywhere in cities, in airports, chanting and demanding money.
Scary people? Not the impression I had from pop culture. I think of them as harmless buffoons in movies like Airplane or spiritual seekers like George Harrison on the cover of My Sweet Lord. Additionally, if the cult members were scary people and their robes and bowls and begging made them scary, does this make the missing Hannah also scary? Unclear.
The law wasn’t on our side… the cult even had armed bodyguards to keep parents like us from snatching our children back.
Okay. Um, hmm.
Yes, this book sent me down a path of trying to learn more, about Hare Krishna, the book itself, and the relationship between the book and the depiction of Hare Krishna within it. My Google searches weren’t particularly satisfying. This is one of the central differences between reading a book written today and one written in 1990. Even the worst books you read today, you can google around and find reactions to them, long reads, debates. Type their names into social media and see what people are saying about them. I’ve hardly found any discussions of the way the Hare Krishnas are depicted in this book, aside from passing references in nostalgic blog posts.
Caroline B. Cooney vs. Sally Rooney
There’s something I loved about this The Face on the Milk Carton and I don’t think I would’ve liked it so much if I hadn’t recently attempted to read the recent bestseller Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney.
I’ll originally intended to write more about that book in a separate blog post—and my reasons for not finishing it—but realized I can cover it here, as the things I disliked about it are contrasted by the things I liked about The Face on the Milk Carton.
The trouble with Beautiful World etc is that there is no point of view, other than a floating, non-omniscient point of view that matches the point of view of a film camera. We are constantly told what characters’ faces are doing. And we get their dialogue. And that’s it. Action and dialogue and lots of passive voice.
My least favorite scene in what I read of Beautiful World, Where Are You was a tedious, never-ending depiction of phone sex between two characters who may or may not be in love. I don’t know if the phone sex scene was meant to be cute or exciting or sexy but it did little more than bore me and seemingly last for hundreds of tedious pages. It reminded me more than anything of It’s a Wonderful Life and this description of that movie from The Guardian:
Weighing in at 135 minutes, Wonderful Life isn’t the longest film ever made but it sometimes feels like it. Single shot scenes – like the one in which the Baileys chat at the dinner table, or George and Mary meander home from the dance – stretch on for what feels like days.
But back to this book I did not like, and why. It’s the complete lack of voice, lack of POV, lack of any reason to care.
Throughout the first few chapters, we get sentences like:
They appeared to be about the same age, in their late twenties and thirties.
And:
Her outward attitude had become more alert and lively since the man had entered the room.
This might be okay, because initially I suspected that the point of view we were getting this scene from was some kind of bystander. Someone across the room, a bartender or other patron. But this is the same kind of action we get when these are the only characters in a scene, or even when a character is alone. During the interminable phone sex scene, we have no insight into either character’s thoughts beyond a description of their faces and voices.
My breaking point was when the character Felix—who could be interesting, if written about in an interesting way—is looking at his phone, by himself, with no one around, and instead of having any insights into the relationship he has with his phone, the names in his phone, the emotions he’s feeling, or even the reality that he has seen his phone before, we get this:
In the group chat, someone with the username Mick replied: Where the fuck are you lad??? Someone with the username Dave wrote: Hold on are you in ITALY? What the fuck haha. You not at work this week. Felix typed out a reply.
And no, these are not chats from strangers. This is a group chat with his friends. The only reason they are called “someone with the username…” is because the author is choosing to lock us out from knowledge of who these people are.
What is this? Why would anything ever be written this way? I understand it’s intentional, because how could it not be, because why would anything be written like that unless you meant to write it like that, but my impression is that someone decided the easiest way to get this thing optioned for and adapted to the screen was to write something as close to the final screenplay as possible. And yes, I do believe that’s why this book is written in such a flat, empty manner.
So what I’m saying is that a young adult novel from 1990 is a far superior novel to Beautiful World, Where Are You?, which will certainly be on a bunch of best books of 2021 lists.
What I liked about The Girl with the Face on the Milk Carton is the tight, focused use of perspective. We get Janie’s point of view and Janie’s point of view only. It’s odd to say the thing I liked most about a young adult novel is the technique—or that seems odd, at least, while I write it—but it’s the truth. Too many mysteries depart from the perspective of the protagonist and immediately muddle the mystery. It seems to happen more and more. Leap into a character’s head for three sentences, before leaping back into another. Worse is what Rooney does, writing the entire thing from the view of a third party observer, in which case it might as well be a television drama. The Face on the Milk Carton does not do those things, and that’s enough for me to praise it.
When should you describe a character’s facial expression?
This is a concept I return to constantly. I don’t know if it’s a rule I was once taught or once read about but it’s simple:
If you are telling a story from a certain character’s point of view—whether first person or third person—you should not describe their facial expression, unless they’re looking in a mirror. Likewise, if you are describing a character’s facial expression, that’s a good way to indicate to the audience that the character you’re describing is not the POV character.
That’s the rule, my facial expression rule. If you are doing third-person limited, consider whose faces you describe and whose you do not. In the case of Sally Rooney, it can’t even be described as third-person limited. It’s third-person no-access.
The Milk Carton: Page Turner Status Confirmed
I realized, at a certain point, the book would end with a cliffhanger. Why? Because every chapter ended with a cliffhanger and as the last page crept closer, I realized there wouldn’t be a way to satisfy.
Yes, we eventually learn how Janie ended up with her fake/adopted parents/grandparents, and that they aren’t the original kidnappers, even if they are sorta kidnappers, but we also get an ending where Janie is about to reunite (via a landline telephone) with her birth parents—and then it ends. Just like that. Book over.
A day after finishing this, I started reading the sequel and realized I don’t need to read this right now. I might read it eventually, maybe even some time soon, but for now I’ve had my fill. I won’t read it again but I do think you should read it, whoever you are, and you should certainly prioritize The Face on the Milk Carton over Beautiful World, Where Are You.