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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who was the only person Cindy told about her second pregnancy?

2. What did Cindy tell Nicole their parents’ fights were mostly concerned with?

3. How does Nicole characterize her father’s temperament?

4. How many generations back could Nicole’s father trace his lineage from his generation?

5. How did Nicole’s mother explain the adoption to Nicole on the phone?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does giving birth change Nicole’s view of her own birth?

2. How do the routines of new parenthood change Nicole’s view of her own early months?

3. How does the relationship between Grace and Abigail reflect Nicole’s relationship with Cindy back to her?

4. What information did Cindy get from her father when she asked him whether she had a sister?

5. How does Nicole get Cindy to discuss the hard things she had originally wanted to avoid talking about?

6. How did Cindy get her father to admit that there was another sister?

7. What could Cindy tell Nicole about their father?

8. What information does Nicole get from Cindy’s photographs?

9. What did Nicole learn about her father’s temperament during the visit?

10. What was the source of the anxiety Nicole felt in advance of meeting her birth father?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Nicole says that she found a society in people who were displaced or came from broken families. What does she have in common with those people, and what is the basis of their common ground? How does this book help build that common ground with readers?

Essay Topic 2

Where is the climax of this book? Are there different climaxes? What questions does each climax resolve? What questions does each climax leave unanswered?

Essay Topic 3

When is All You Can Ever Know most itself? What is its characteristic passage, or moment? What makes that moment or passage the most representative of the book as a whole? Are there any places where the book seems to depart from its typical self, as if to become a different book?

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This section contains 964 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample