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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 did Janisse and her brothers covertly celebrate Christmas one year without their father's knowledge?

2. In what year was Janisse born?

3. When Charlie somehow got out of the mental institution to which Clyo had him committed, how did she persuade him to leave the family home again?

4. What elements of the Borderlanders' lives led them to have migratory habits?

5. How often does Janisse say thunderstorms happened in the summer in their area of Georgia?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Janisse Ray use her great-grandfather Pun's career progression to show how white-collar jobs can be even more damaging to the environment than can blue-collar jobs?

2. Janisse said there was only one type of occasion that did not elicit shame from her role as a junkyard owner's daughter. What is the only thing that occurs that does not bring her shame?

3. Why do people call certain parts of the wood of the longleaf pine "fat-lightered"?

4. Besides the fact that he thought it had better prices than other stores, why did Frank shop at Winn-Dixie?

5. What happened during one of the Ray family's only vacations that highlighted the fact that they were a subject of fascination for others?

6. What elements did Frank consider crucial to the business of buying?

7. The second sentence of the chapter entitled Timber says, "About the same time, the production of naval stores in North Carolina began to wane and big turpentine producers in North Carolina sashayed into Georgia" 99). What is the effect of the author's choice of the verb "sashayed" and what is her purpose in making that choice?

8. How does the Thingfinders Club play into the memoir's message regarding ecology?

9. Whose idea was it to spread old shoes around underneath the grapevine and what was the intended purpose of that act?

10. Why were the conditions so favorable for Frank's junkyard business to make money?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Explain the significance of Janisse Ray's abject rejection of her great-grandfather Pun's advice to not "take more on your heart than you can shake off on your heels." How does her rejection of this maxim relate to the larger themes within the memoir?

Essay Topic 2

Find instances of the author drawing parallels between the creatures of southern Georgia and the people who inhabit the region. How does each instance send its own message and how do they work in concert with one another to send a larger, cohesive message to the reader of the memoir?

Essay Topic 3

Discuss the role that mental illness plays within the course of Janisse Ray's memoir. What does the reader learn about mental illness, the havoc it can wreak within a family, and how it can also bring a family closer together? How is the mental illness running throughout her family shown to have shaped who Janisse is, even though she herself does not exhibit signs of mental illness?

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