Reviews for Whatever happened to Janie?

The average rating for Whatever happened to Janie? based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-05-02 00:00:00 Thomas Hlavinka When she returns to her birth family, her sister looks her in the eyes and says, "You are scum." Kids can be ice cold.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-10 00:00:00 Tina Nelson Seeing this one through my adult eye-view, it's a little bit easier to empathize with Janie. As a kid, I thought she was such an ungrateful brat. And seriously, when they contacted her birth family in the last book, what did she think was going to happen? They were going to tell the Johnsons, whose daughter Hannah KIDNAPPED HER from them, "Yeah, we don't want her back. You can keep the daughter who was kidnapped from the shopping center at age 3. We have four other kids, we know you'll love and take care of her like you've done in the past, when we thought she was being tortured/raped/killed, etc. Might as well not even bother." YEAH RIGHT - didn't think so! But thinking about it from Janie's perspective, the Springs are asking a lot of a fifteen year old kid. They basically want her to turn on the people she spent almost her entire life with and believed were her parents, and want her to pretend the last twelve years never happened. Insta-Jennie coming right up, just forget that other family kiddo. As someone who has come to believe that who you end up turning into as an adult is something of nature AND nurture, it made me empathize with Janie. It's not like they spent 12 years torturing/abusing her -- they believed she was their granddaughter, the child of their lost-to-a-cult daughter. They treated her as a precious piece of something they thought was gone forever. I also better understand the anger on the part of both Stephen and Jodie Spring, who have seen firsthand the damage of not knowing what happened to their sister (and living with parents who were trying to prevent another worst case scenario). Overall, fairly realistic for a look at what might happen when a teen kidnap victim is returned to her biological family. Except for the ending, which would never happen in a million years.