Bitter And Sweet Quotes

Hadley Teff

Jesse

Language 9 Honors

20 January 2023

Creative Title Here

Every single aspect of your life has to do with the relationships that have been lost or found, created or maintained in your life. Anything in your life can be a realtionship. Whether it be with a person, place, or idea, relationships drive the way that people work, think, and accomplish things. The novel, “Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet” By Laekan Zea Kemp displays this idea of how relationships impact everything that occurs in life. Pen has worked for her family restaurant her whole life, after being fired by her own parents after admitting to not attending her college classes, she feels lost. Luckily, a boy named Xander comes around and helps her find her sense

The strong relationship that they two of them have together made Pen find a sense of belonging and feel like she knows where she is headed. The stars will guide you home is a common saying, and the quote digs into the fact that Pen was lost without Xander, but when she is with him, she sees the stars, and finally has a path for where she belongs and where she feels at home with. Xander impacts Pen in a very stong way, but on the flipside, strong relationships can also have a negative impact too, one of Pen’s childhood memories is shared with a flashback, and it talks about the first time that Pen’s father showed her how to cook, the short memory concludes with “I’m looking at my father, who is savoring my imperfect creation as if it’s the best thing he’s ever eaten. He opens his eyes and there is a light in them that warms me from the inside out. Because he tasted the love. Because he showed me how to put it there” (Kemp 54). As Pen comes back to the real world, she realized that valuable time with her parents is over. “The memory rips to shreds, along with every smell, every taste, every laugh, and every word. Every second I spent in the kitchen growing up. And even

While Pen is waiting for her college class to start, which she is going to skip all she can think about is her mothers shoes. “How they’ve sat in the same spot by the door or almost twenty years. Scuffed and cracked, the shadow of her foot pressed to the leather even when the laces are loose” (Kemp 15). Pen’s mothers shoes symbolize how hard she has worked for the benefit for her kids. Pen’s mother has worked really hard to give her children the best lives and education that she can, and showing that she hasn’t bought new shows in twenty years shows how strong that relationship is between her and her children. Pen’s mother is willing to risk everything for her children and she puts them first instead of herself. The shoes show how important it was for Pen to have a mother who really cared that much about her own daughter because without that strong relationship with her mother, she would have never made it due to a lack of money, and she would not have gotten as far as she did, along with the fact that she would lose her sense of