Feeding The Monster Crank Sparknotes

Paper Assignment
Mitzy Ceballos
Feeding the Monster

Crank is a book about a young girl who seems to be lost in her own world. She has yet to find out who she really is. This girl has barely hit puberty and maybe being a late bloomer has caused her to make up for the time lost. Like any other teenager she can’t seem to understand why her mom is so strict, and especially why she is so in love with a husband who acts as if he has no backbone. Kristina is her name. Kristina is a young girl; at the age of 17 her life has been pretty average. Having two siblings, a sister who is confused about her sexual orientation, and a younger brother who has all the attention for being the new baby of the family. A stepfather who acts as if he has no flaws;

and from his actions he seems to be Narcissistic because no matter what he can never be pleased and is always right.

Kristina wanted to visit her birth father and her mother was extremely reluctant. Once Kristina got there she realized why she was never allowed to visit. When Kristina comes back she is not the same. Kristina is slowly dying away while Bree takes over. Bree is Kristina’s other side that no one knew about; not even Kristina. Bree is the exact opposite of Kristina, she likes to party, have sex with boys, do drugs, and do things Kristina would have never even dared to think about doing; which includes battling an addiction to Meth.

When Kristina arrives to Albuquerque, New Mexico. She automatically has second thoughts and wants to go back home, there’s no home cooked meals and if you’re hungry you better order out or go to the local diner for a meal. Her dad is never home, he always seems to be drinking, getting high or both. Seeing as he is unemployed and working under the table while being a Type II Alcoholic he has a lot of free time. One day Kristina meets a boy named Adam. Adam and her

start to hang out a lot and Kristina develops strong feelings for him. She tells Adam her name is Bree. Bree starts doing wild things with Adam that Kristina would have never dared to do. Normative Social Influence occurs when Bree meets up with Adam and a couple of his friends and they are all doing “Crank”. When Adam asks Bree if she will snort a line of Meth she agrees, seeing that everyone is doing the same the last thing she wanted to do was stand out or have them think that she is the farthest thing from cool. When Bree goes home she thinks nothing of it, because in her mind doing it once wasn’t going to harm her. She thinks that that would be her first and last time doing it but when she hears a knock on her door, Adam asks her if she wants to get high again and she resists. Adam however is very Persuasive, he invites her to just hang out no drugs involved once she agrees and they’re just having fun without any drugs, he uses the Foot in the door technique and asks her if she wants to get high with him this time she agrees. She starts going out a lot more and doing more and more Meth. This is where the Law Of Effect plays in, Kristina feels like Bree when she does “the monster” and gets a really good feeling, even though she knows it’s bad for her and she shouldn’t be doing this the pleasurable effect is worth it because when she doesn’t get high she feels like plain old Kristina.

Once Kristina comes home from being with her biological father she is no longer the same Kristina.

The first thing that hits her mind when she arrives in the airport is where can she find Meth. She starts having really bad anxiety because she fears that she will not be able to get a fix, at least not as soon as she wants it. Bree starts having withdrawal symptoms because she goes a whole week with out having Meth in her system and she starts acting out a lot. When her friends try calling her to talk about her trip and she’s very irritable she blames it on Jet lag, which for a while makes sense because she was in New Mexico but it was only a couple of hours in difference. She starts suffering from Sleep Deprivation because she has no access to Meth, and without it she’s falling apart. Kristina looks for a source and when she finds one the same dose that used to get her high no longer does. A stronger Tolerance to the drug has occurred and she needs to buy a larger amount of Meth to feel the high. Without a job she starts dipping into her savings and saving up for a car is no longer her goal. Kristina fiends for the monster so much that it’s affecting her relationship with her friends, parents, and siblings. Her mom tried to sit down and ask her what was going on, at one point she thought she was depressed because she would just stay locked inside her room. But once she would go from happy because she had just gotten her fix to angry when it wore off her mom feared she was

suffering from being bipolar. She eventually gets involved with a boy named Brendan because he has connections to Meth and it’s easier for her to access it this way. Although she would never be around him if she were not hooked on the monster, being addicted makes you see everything in a whole new light. Bree goes off with Brendan one night and he supplies Meth, not knowing that he was giving her uninvited debt. Brendan attempts to have sex with her. Kristina says she’s not that type of girl and Brendan completely disagrees. Since he gave Bree her high he felt entitled to something, so forcibly he has sex with her. In Kristina’s eyes she was raped. Since Bree did drugs Brendan Stereotyped her as a girl who had sex with everyone, when in reality she was a virgin. Bree went on to eliminate Brendan from her life and moves on to a new boy who she met named Chase. Chase also wants to have sex with her but he also doesn’t want to rush into it because his feelings for Bree are really strong and losing her would break his heart. Chase isn’t the perfect guy either, common interests brought them together and that common interest was the monster.

Just when Bree thought her life could not get any worse she finds out that she is pregnant. Immediately she thinks having an abortion is her only way out, being addicted and at such a young age she goes to a clinic. When she admits to her parents that she is pregnant she changes her mind and decides to keep the baby, eventually stops drinking so her baby won’t have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. However she’s so hooked on Meth that she can’t break free enough and going through withdrawal while being pregnant could kill her baby.

Kristina was always very quiet, excelled in school and in anyone’s eyes she was the perfect daughter. She often aimed to please and would always conform to her parents opinion because she was not the type to go against her parents wishes. She seems to have Reactive Attachment Disorder, growing up her mother was very stressed because Kristina’s dad was pretty much a dead beat who cared about no one but himself. Kristina’s mom on the other hand could barely handle her self so there wasn’t much room for anyone to pay attention to Kristina. Bree and Kristina are both fighting for the young girl’s body and so far Bree seems to be winning; she went from being an ideal teen daughter to being a troubled teen mother. Everything changes and nothing is predictable.