The Face On The Milk Carton/ Character Analysis

The day after Janie found the dress, she gave her parents dull and mean responses since she was upset with them. The text states, “Something wrong, honey? Why are you mad at us?” Janie then starts giving her parents attitude and they start yelling at each other. The next day, Janie had a Honors Breakfast. After the honors breakfast, Janie asks her “parents,” “I want to know why there aren’t any photographs of me until five. Even if you didn’t buy a camera until then, you would have had a baby portrait done. I want to know who Hannah is upstairs in the trunk. I want to know why you won’t let me see my birth certificate.” 

*SPOILER ALERT* Janie’s mom and dad sit her down. They tell her that Hannah is her mother and that they’re not really her parents. They tell Janie they are really her grandparents and that Hannah was their daughter. They began telling her that basically her mother, Hannah was an unusual teenager. She wasn’t crazy about boys or stuff like that, she was mostly concerned of right and wrong. When a cult came along and swept thousands during the 60s and 70s, from the East Coast to the West Coast. It attracted Hannah. When Hannah was 16, she begged on her knees for her parents to let her join the cult. The text says, “We tried everything to get Hannah out. We took her on long vacations, we sent her to live with my cousin in Atlanta, we tried traditional church.” They say no matter what they did, Hannah would never budge. They wrote to Hannah a lot, but she rarely wrote back. Janie’s grandfather, Frank, got a letter by the cult that Hannah had been married to a member in the cult. Then, one day, the door opened, and Hannah was standing there with Janie. She had escaped.  After everything they could do, eventually hannah went back to the cult. So, for the sake of Janie, Hannah’s parents lost touch with Hannah. Stopped calling on her birthday, stopped sending presents, stopped writing letters and sending postcards. After all the crying and hugging, Janie was relieved. Janie says, “Mother and daddy are all I have, and all I want.” 

Character Analysis

Reeve was Janie’s next door neighbor. He doesn’t care about about his schoolwork. In the text it states that,” Reeve never did homework.” But he got B’s as grades at times, also with some D’s ad F’s. Janie and Reeve knew each other since they were little kids because their parents know each other as well.