Ashes Reading Response

Sabina Chackerian                        Response to “ASHES”                         802

Sometimes we want something so bad that we ignore the reality. The story “Ashes” by Susan Beth Pfeffer is about a girl who struggles with her parents’ divorce and her relationship with her parents. She lives with her mother and sees her dad once a week, this day is the highlight of her week. Ashes is put in a difficult situation when she must decide which parents relationship she will jeperdize by either stealing the “saftey money” from her mother for her father or leaving the money. Throughout this story, the author shows the reader how love can make it hard to recognize who someone is when you want or need them to be better then who they are.

Throughout the story Ashes learns to face the truth about her father. When she sees her father at the beginning of the story she makes a comparison to her father by saying “He’s always there if you need him, well, not always. He’s unexpectedly there like a warm day in january”. To the reader this doesn’t seem like a good quality in a parent but Ashes turns her Dad’s distance into something beautiful. This example illustrates Ashes thought process of warmth and unreliability for most of the story. “Last week he told me to be an astronaut. The week before that, the CEO of a fortune 500 corporation.  And the week before that, he’d been stunned by my spirituality.” Ashes truly wants  to have a good relationship with her father. We can tell she wants to feel these things he is saying are true, even so her tone suggests Ashes is disappointed that her dad isn’t recognizing  her true talents, The reader might infer that he is not as thoughtful because he  is making up these jobs that do not relate to each other . Later in the text he takes her out to dinner which is not something they often can afford on a night when she sees him, during their special night he ends up asking her to take money from her mom and give it to him so he can pay someone back some people. This makes Ashes doubt her father even more and makes her less hopeful for a change in him. This opens her eyes to the fact that her father isn’t as wonderful as she wants him to be. This shows he is manipulating her and makes her wonder if the whole time he is saying things that are “loving” he is just trying to flatter her for selfish purposes Ashes knows this in her heart and this makes her feel let down.

Similarly, in the beggining of the story Ashes doesnt recognize the motives behind her mother.  For example she says how every time she sees her dad “the sun cast off just a little more warmth then it had the day before” the reader can at the beginning of the story, infer that this means ashes is  excited to see her father, then she says “With mom, there are a lot of rainy days and she takes a grim sort of pleasure in being ready for them.” This shows Ashes is in denial of what is important for her, to the reader the mother is doing somthing important for Ashes . The way Ashes says “she takes a grim sort of pleasure in them” makes it seem like Ashes is focusing on the necessary things her mother does but not the things she wants in the moment. It goes on to say all the things she has ready for any type of emergency, this shows that she is prepared and responsible which is very important  for raising a child. On some level Ashes knows this but knows that being reliable isnt always as much fun. Through out the story Ashes begins to relizes everything her mother does for her.

Ashes perception of her parents changes greatly throught the story. When she doesnt decline taking the money it seems like she is almost blinded by these outward appearence, but the fact that she is hesitant to take the money from her mother shows that the images that she has created of her parents is shifting and making her doubt her original views. Through facing disapointment with her father, she starts to develop a more relistic view about him and starts to admit what she has known about him all along. While Ashes wants her father to be supportive, spontaneous and loving, as his character developed she was more aware of the fact he was manipulative, unreliable and selfish. Through the support from her mother she starts to also understand her mother more. Ashes wanted to think her mother was cold, strict and distant because this made her father seem like a victim and a better person but Ashes faces the truth that her mother is very responsible, reliable and protective. Through out the story ashes learns alot about the true intetions of her parents. the author does a good job of geting this point across. I now better understand the preshure teens can feel when facing there parents divorce. I can predict that Ashes will not take the money because she has learned the importance of what her mother works for. At the beginning I think she would have taken it because she wanted to please her dad so bad she couldnt face the reality that it wasnt the right thing to do. I think it is important for us to understand the issues that teens have, many teens are in there own world and do not understand what the people around them are going through.