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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 Plum's mother feel about Plum's plan to have bariatric surgery?

2. What types of meetings does Plum attend in the basement of a church?

3. Who sends Plum an email while pretending to be a teenage girl in need of help from Kitty?

4. What is lying across Plum's bed that embarrasses Plum the first time Verena visits Plum's apartment?

5. How many years has it been since Plum set foot inside her childhood home on Harper Lane?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the author's purpose for including the enormous list of lipstick colors within the narrative?

2. What information does Julia reveal about Leeta during her first meeting with Plum?

3. What significant event happens in the spring of Plum's junior year of high school?

4. What is the significance of Leeta's name?

5. How does the terrorist organization known as Jennifer claim responsibility for the murders of Michael Simmons and Davis Green?

6. Discuss the significance of Plum's clothing organization choices in the first part of the novel.

7. Describe Plum's job at Austen Media and how she comes to inhabit it.

8. How does Janine's outburst at the Baptist Diet meeting foreshadow Plum's own coming changes?

9. What causes Julia to ask Plum if she will hand over the 50,000 plus email addresses of teenage girls who have written to Kitty?

10. What does Plum mean when she says that it takes her awhile to "fully inhabit" (83) her New York life again after she finishes speaking to her mother on the phone?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Look carefully at the passages of the novel that describe Plum's responses to the teenage girls who write questions to Kitty. What is the author's purpose for discussing at length the nature of Plum's role as a ghostwriter for Kitty?

Essay Topic 2

How is the topic of discovery treated within the novel and how does its treatment relate to the book's repeated allusions to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland?

Essay Topic 3

Analyze the novel Dietland from an Existential perspective. What elements of life does it suggest hold the most meaning and why?

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