Expecations

I'm not in the Crank Book Club, but I'm reading Crank by Ellen Hopkins. In Crank, the main character's name is Kristina. Kristina's parents are divorced, and she hasn't seen her father for years. One summer, Kristina goes to stay with her father for three weeks to get to know him. Kristina does not know what to expect of their relationship. Kristina and her father's relationship represents how expectations determine peoples' outlooks on life.

Kristina starts off with high expectations of her father. She complains about her stepfather Scott very often. She says, "I've been alone since my mom met Scott. He sucked the nectar from her heart like a famished butterfly. No nurture, no nourishment for Kristina." Kristina feels alone in her home life, so she is hoping for a heart-warming vacation with her dad.

In the beginning of the book, Kristina first sees her father after several years. After a conversation starting in Kristina calling him "Daddy" and ending in "Dad," Kristina says, "From daddy to dad in thirty seconds. We were strangers, after all." Strangers is a word that implies unconnectedness, so it to me seems very different from the idea of a father. Kristina feels unconnected from her father in just a short space of time. This shows how quickly people can go from being close to being strangers. It causes Kristina pain, because she wanted to have a good relationship with her dad. Then, when Kristina sees her dad's house she says, "I'd made an awful mistake. Daddy wasn't the Prince of Albuquerque. He was the King of Cliché." Kristina wanted her dad to be something special. She says she thought he would be "Prince of Albuquerque," which means she thought he would have a great life. However, she's disappointed by his "cliché" life. I think that if Kristina had had an open mind about who her father may be, she would have been happier at this point. People should not hold high expectations without reason behind their expectations.

While Kristina stays with her dad, she learns that he's wild, and lets her do whatever she wants. He even encourages her to smoke, and at one point, smokes with her. Kristina says, "I mean, there I was, snorting crank with my dad, boyfriend, and his other girlfriend. Something majorly wrong with that picture." Though Kristina does smoke with her dad, she recognizes that it's a "majorly wrong picture." This upsets her because she wanted a fatherly figure, and she just got a partier. I think that it's crazy how different people can turn out to be, especially when you assume who they will be and set expectations. Later, she writes, "Dad went out, Left me to fret, to stress, to cry, to choke on emotion." Kristina is at a hard point in her life. She had thought that she's be less alone in Albuquerque, away from her stepfather and his influence on her mom, but she's being ignored again. If I were Kristina, I would feel utterly betrayed by my dad.

Kristina's dad betrays her. However, now that I think about it, he only betrayed her expectations of him. Kristina hadn't seen her dad in eight years. She hadn't had a way of knowing who her father would be, but she was extremely hopeful. I am an optimist, so I won't conclude that expectations should be set low. I think expectations should not be set. I think if people have open minds when walking into new experiences in life, they'll be surprised by everything they find.