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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 is NOT a place that the narrator mentions as being in her neighborhood?

2. How many hours per week do the art students spend in art classes?

3. What is NOT one of the Commandments described in Our Mothers’ Commandments?

4. When the girls meet the white boys’ parents, they suddenly become what?

5. When the white boys try to be gently intimate, how do the girls NOT react?

Short Essay Questions

1. How do the girls handle the situation with Joseph Justin O’Brien?

2. How do the girls change once they begin attending the high school for the arts?

3. How does the narrator describe the community in which the brown girls live?

4. How do the Italian boys change throughout Part One?

5. How do the girls feel when family members and friends leave their homes for other cities?

6. Why do the brown girls call their teachers terrible names?

7. What takes place in Night?

8. How does the narrator describe the various skin tones of the brown girls?

9. What does the narrator say happens to girls who are caught sneaking out or coming home late?

10. Who are the guests who stay with the brown girls and their families? Why are they there?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What is reinforced regarding the parents of the brown girls through the events in Part Five? What is often the relationship between those in the United States and those back home? What does this say about immigrants to the U.S. today and the role of those new to the U.S.? What can those who are not new Americans learn from them?

Essay Topic 2

The plot is quite linear, as Daphne Palasi Andreades tells the story following a timeline of the brown girls as they age. How do you as the reader feel about this approach to storytelling? Why do you feel this way? If you were the author, would you have written it differently? Why or why not?

Essay Topic 3

Like the brown girls in Brown Girls, Daphne Palasi Andreades is from Queens, New York and a brown girl herself. How does this aid the reader in believing the narrator and author are one and the same? What other details from the book suggest that the author is the narrator and the book is autobiographical? Why might the details of this story be important for the author to share about her own life?

(see the answer keys)

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