Final Draft of the book, "Crank" QUESTION #5

      The book, “Crank” described Kristina as a smart girl at school, but she had challenged many kinds of problems at school and her family. There are so many saddness thing happen to her: her parents got divorced when she was 5 years old, then she lived with her mom and her step-father. Unfortunately, as time goes on, there are many things happened to Kristina and changed her personality and characteristics. The purpose for the author of writing this book is that she tried to express the idea of influence from someone’s opinion is able to change a person’s fate in both ways.

     Kristina tries very hard at school to be perfect, but inside of her mind, she wants a perfect family instead of getting perfect grade in school. Her desire is to live in a family with her siblings and her parents who actually have the blood relationship with her. Unfortuanely, her parents got divorced when she was still young, and she found herself there is no way to keep a contact with her father. Thus Kristina asked to go to her father's house for a while. When Kristina went to her father and planned to live with him for a short period, her father did not care about her so much. Not only because he got so much work to do and also he does not consider Kristina as his "daughter". Thus he left her at home by herself alone. This make Kristina feels like her father tries to ignore her:

"Work?" "You have heard of work" "You couldn't take one day off?" "You don't know my boss" "Does he know about me?" "She knows you're here." "Your daughter comes to visit..." "She doesn't know." "Know what?" "That you're my daughter." "Who am  I then?" "A long-lost relative." (P30)

     Since after the divorced, Kristina's father lives pretty far away from where her mom lives, so it is not so easy to have a conversation with her father. Although Kristina tried very hard to get some free days hang out with her father, but he told Kristina that work is more important than her. Kristina feels pissed off of what her father did because she begged her mother for so long in order to get the permission of going to her father's house, and now her father expected her as a "long lost relative". I think her father is pretty rude, and it just hurts a high school student's feeling. Kristina was dissapointed at what his father did to her. The writter, Ellen used many adjective words to describe the change of Kristina's emotions. And later on the book, she talks about her marriage in her life. When people are putting a bad mood onto something, things would always turn worse. 

    After Kritina knows she is pregnant, she was trying to hide the fact and not to tell anyone, not even her husband. The reason why is that she does not want to distract him from his job, and also she was thinking if she should tell her parents. Once she does not feel well because she was pregnant for six months, and Adam was driving her home from a party. While Adam was driving, he told Kritina that she should tell her parents about the baby, and also fix the relationship:

"He suggested, Maybe you should talk to your mom"(P501)

            Then Kristina replied:

"What was he thinking? How could i talk to her? We hadn't really talked in years. What would I tell her now?" (P502)

         From their conversation, I can tell that Kristina was not willing to tell her parents that she is pregnant, because she felt strange to how selfish they actually are. Adam knows Kristina is just scared  to talk to her parents, so he presses the number to her parents, and give the phone to her after connected it. Her parents feel so surprise and happy after Kristina told them she is pregnant. And they started building up their relationship because of the baby.Sometimes, things will just get easier if people give more forgiveness and tolerant to each other. "I told you once before that life is full of choices, sometimes, good or bad, hard or easy, we make the right choices. When I told my mom, she cried and cursed. Then she softened and thanked me for honoring"(P525) This quote shows that if Kristina and her mom have known the misunderstanding before they are being ignoring to each other, things will get easier. Oftentime, forgiveness and tolerant could make life easier, and more success, espectially in people's relationship.

         In this book, the writer uses a lot of adjectives to describe the changing of every character's emotion, and also their thoughts. The writer also shows sometimes being stubborn would miss many chances. Throughout the experiences that Kristina had from her childhood to her motherhood period, the books shows it is very important to give understanding and forgiveness to the people who are around you, because everyone make mistakes, you cannot expect someone being perfect at you. There is no way to do so just because this is how the cycle works. There are many big lessons in the book that are relating to our life.
        All in all, I think the writer expresses the ideas of family issues by writing this book and how we can treat the problems. Sometimes saddness things just happen, and we cannot stop them. Instead of complaining whose fault is it, we should rather look forward, and find out the solutions for it. Like in Kristina's case, if Adam did not make the phone call for her, she would not know it was a misunderstanding betwwen her and her parents, and she would not be able to know the truth. People sometims might just get mad and make some misunderstandings for no reasons, but then it will cause more troubles and problems, and hurting people around them. If we can start to learn how to forgive and tolerant to people, there would be less misunderstanding between each other; if there are less misunderstanding in our life, things will just become wonderful. Each good and bad choice in one's life is  effecting and changing their fate.