The Importance Of Relationships In Somewhere Between Bitter And Sweet '

Hadley Teff

Jesse

Language 9 Honors

20 January 2023

Relationships Impact Everything

Every single aspect of a person’s life has to do with the relationships they have created, found, maintained or lost. Relationships can be many things in life including people, places, ideas and experiences. These relationships drive the way people work, think, and accomplish things. In the novel “Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet,” the author, Laekan Zea Kemp, shows how relationships impact everything that occurs in life. Pen, the main character, has worked for her family restaurant her whole life. After being fired, by her own parents, for admitting she was not attending her college classes, she feels lost. Luckily, a boy named Xander connects with Pen and

Pen worked up the courage to tell her parents that she was not attending her college classes. “The truth is, I haven’t been going to school. At all. And-... ‘No!’ He slams his hands down on the table, the metal legs squealing. ‘Tonight’s your last night’”(Kemp 22-23). It is very ironic that Pen’s family owns the restaurant and she works for it, and her own father fires her from it. It is unthinkable that a father could do such a thing to his child, leaving her to feel like she has nobody and nowhere to go. The restaurant is the only place that Pen has ever worked and she feels at home there, and she feels like she belongs there. Strong relationships make people trust other people, more than is imaginable, and when people break trust like that, it is unimaginably hard to overcome. Not only is it ironic that Pen’s own father fired her from the restaurant, it is also ironic why he did it. At the end of the book, the restaurant burns down. Pen was expecting her father to be upset about it, but for some reason, he was not.. “But then I look closer. I stare at him as he stares at the flames, and for the first time he’s impossible to read…the faintest flicker in his eyes. And I know that he isn’t mourning, he is free'' (Kemp 320). Pen's father really did not fire her from the restaurant because he was mad at her, he fired her so that she would not spend the rest of her life like he did, being overworked and underpaid, and being caught in situations that were not safe. The relationship shown between Pen and her father displayed that strong relationships can save your whole life, just like Pen’s father saved her life by firing her. Pen’s father was really just looking out for her, which is ironic, because usually when you fire someone it is not in their benefit, but in this case, it was in Pen’s benefit to be fired. Irony was also used in the story to display the impact of strong