Week Forty-Four: The Face On The Milk Carton

This was written as a project for one of the classes my family and I teach. We did a book report on our least favorite book from the six that we covered in our Banned Book Club. I had great fun with this.

The Face on the Milk Carton

This book tells the story of a teenage girl who finds out that she was kidnapped as a toddler through a series of totally unrealistic coincidences and absurd conjecture. Janie Johnson is our paper-flat heroine, a girl with no apparent interests other than the boy next door and no more character depth than trying not to drink milk because of her mild lactose allergy. One day, while surrounded by her insipid and wildly annoying friends who don’t seem to really know her at all, (judging by the fact that they can happily ignore that Janie is having a complete and total mental breakdown while they cheerily eat their lunches,) Janie finds a photo of herself in a missing children’s ad on the side of a milk carton. She recognizes the photo of herself from the dress that she’s wearing, goes into a tailspin and promptly decides that her loving parents must have stolen her away from her “real” family at a young age, all in less time than it takes her school lunch to get cold.

Here is where the real fun starts for Janie. Not only does she spend ninety percent of the rest of the book flip-flopping between hysteria and numbness, she also acquires a markedly crappy boyfriend named Reeve and fails every single one of her classes, but she also becomes so attached to the milk carton with her face on it, she can’t be without it for more than an hour at a time.

During poor cardboard Janie’s meltdown of self destruction, the strangest part of the book happens. Nobody notices. Her teachers just simply keep on giving her assignments, not one of them stopping to wonder why this formerly brilliant pupil is doing so poorly. Her friends actually get mad at her for being distant, not even noticing that she’s having full-blown panic attacks in front of them. Her supposed “Best Friend” calls her up one night, and when Janie doesn’t want to make small talk about nail polish and boys, gets so upset that she essentially disowns her as a friend.

When Janie finally reaches her breaking point, she skips school with her boyfriend, Reeve, and takes a four hour trip down to New Jersey to attempt to find her family through searching through a phonebook at then stalking them outside their home. Neither Reeve nor Janie seem to see any problem with this, and they wait creepily in the car while Janie’s assumed biological family comes home from school. In this interlude, Reeve appears to just have been waiting for Janie to be done with her parked-car stalking so that he can ask her to go to a motel. Janie turns him down, and they get back in the car to make the four hour drive back home. About halfway back home, without having exchanged more than six words, Reeve turns off the highway, drives into a astonishingly skeezy motel parking lot, and rents a room using his mother’s credit card. Janie, who has not been interested in finding a motel *wink wink*, turns him down yet again and then they get back in the car and drive away, not even bothering to check out. With Janie’s breakdown taking up most of her brain space, is it really the golden opportunity to try to find a motel?
For the rest of the ride, Reeve doesn’t speak to her until they realize they had better get their stories straight for their parents, who are going absolutely insane from wondering where their children have gone, and then shortly after the road trip to New Jersey, he dumps her.

I think now is a good time to pause the manic action of this book and talk briefly about the writing style. For example, the metaphors weighed down the pace of the book like a dumbbell on a folded paper airplane. As a matter of fact, wading through the metaphors was like sloshing through a four foot vat of jelly. Reading the superfluous metaphors made me feel as if I was drowning in the ocean with thousands of paper cuts all over my skin.

When the plot wasn’t being bogged down by the poor word choices, The Face on the Milk Carton felt both intensely melodramatic and breakneck, slowed down and meticulously described in all the wrong places, and then suddenly the writing would take off and sweep over hours or days of time in a sentence or two. There was no plot arch, and the one big plot point of the book was stretched out into an overlong, dazed and poorly paced literary cacophony of confusion.

In short, The Face on the Milk Carton is a novel full of unrealistic coincidences, gaping plot holes, overly complicated metaphors, and a plot that is stretched so thinly it’s nearly at its breaking point. The underdeveloped characters left me without a speck of sympathy for their unrealistic plights, and the ending, while leaving the story open for a sequel , left me apathetic with no real desire to read onward.