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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. How does Part One, Bras begin?

2. Brown Girls is a collection of poems that tell the story of girls from what major city?

3. What do the girls give up when family and friends from their native lands come to stay?

4. What are the ethnicities the narrator names in Musical Chairs?

5. In Part One, Last Day, what is the reason the narrator gives for all the rigorous testing and high school applications?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. How does the narrator describe the boys in Brown Boys?

3. What takes place in Great Expectations?

4. In Mothers’ Commandments, what are the Commandments listed by the narrator?

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

6. How does life change for the girls who attend the public arts school?

7. Why might the narrator repeat that the homes the girls live in are neat but hidden, peripheral?

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

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

10. In Brown Boys, how does the narrator describe the different sides of Prospect Park?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Overall, what does 'brown and brown' mean, according to the narrator? What might it mean to the reader? How can people of all colors, races, and genders relate to this? What does this say about the importance of color?

Essay Topic 2

Trish is the only brown girl that the reader knows by name. How is this important? Why might Daphne Palasi Andreades have chosen to only have one named character, with the character being a figment of the girls' imaginations throughout much of Brown Girls? What role does Trish play in the novel? How is it fitting that she is mentioned at the very end of the book?

Essay Topic 3

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?

(see the answer keys)

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