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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. What happened when Nicole was 10 centimeters dilated?

2. How does Cindy characterize her mother’s life?

3. Why did Nicole tell Abigail that she did not miss her mother?

4. What was Nicole’s father’s response, when Cindy asked if she had a sister he had not told her about?

5. What did Cindy tell Nicole their mother blamed the adoption on?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What books did Nicole’s father give to her and to Cindy?

3. How does Nicole characterize her relationship with the newborn baby?

4. What does Nicole’s father tell her about his family’s lineage?

5. How does Nicole characterize Cindy’s temperament?

6. How does Nicole characterize her role as an adoptee in contemporary America?

7. Where does Nicole say the real lessons came from, in her experience of searching for her birth parents?

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

9. What was Nicole’s mother’s reaction to Nicole’s new information about her birth family?

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Nicole describes a number of experiences of racism, and she says that she feels an obligation, in a divided America, to speak up when she sees racist ideas raise their heads. What does Nicole’s book tell us about handling racism, and about reacting to it? What are the advantages and disadvantages of Nicole keeping her accounts of racism general and at a distance?

Essay Topic 2

Evaluate All You Can Ever Know as a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age narrative. What are the challenges Nicole faces in rites of passage in this memoir? How does she overcome these challenges, and what does she learn at each stage? What kind of person is she at the end?

Essay Topic 3

Would you recommend All You Can Ever Know? For what purposes would you recommend All You Can Ever Know, and what kinds of readers would you recommend it for? What other book would you recommend that would cover the same material or tell the same story in a different way?

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