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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 color is the suitcase that Evvie retrieves from the hall closet, packs, and puts into her car at the start of the prologue?

2. In what gesture do Evvie and Dean engage after he expresses his gratitude for the way she had stood up to the woman on the porch?

3. To what object does Evvie compare time when she discusses 22- and 23-year-olds in Chapter 11?

4. Evvie reveals that she took what action in high school in order to ensure that Tim would be valedictorian?

5. The issue of Sports Illustrated at which Evvie glances in Fall: Chapter 1 is addressed to which character?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the history of the friendship between Dean and Andy?

2. What object does Evvie place on the mantel just before she opens the door to meet Dean and what is the object's significance?

3. Which comment of Frank's makes Evvie furious during Thanksgiving dinner and why?

4. In what way does the theme of isolation appear within Fall: Chapter 1 of Evvie Drake Starts Over?

5. For what major change is Evvie preparing when the reader first meets her in the prologue entitled First?

6. What is the "one thing" (54) Dean claims to have done seriously ever since the age of ten?

7. Name and discuss a second coping mechanism Evvie used to combat the feelings inspired by her unhappy marriage, according to the narrator.

8. Discuss an instance when Holmes uses a literary device to comment on the nature of youth.

9. What advice does Dean give to Evvie when she is angry about her father's Thanksgiving day comment?

10. What do Evvie's set of dishes with the yellow flowers on them symbolize?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Determine Holmes’s message within the novel Evvie Drake Starts Over regarding the negative effects of isolation.

Essay Topic 2

Discuss Holmes's choice to tell the story of Evvie Drake Starts Over using a third person limited omniscient narrator. What elements of the novel's themes lend themselves to this choice and what are Holmes’s intended effects on the reader?

Essay Topic 3

William Faulkner once famously claimed that the most important literature deals with the subject of the human heart in conflict with itself. Explain how the theme of Human versus Self is demonstrated within Holmes’s novel Evvie Drake Starts Over. Create a decisive, arguable claim and prove it with quotes from the novel.

(see the answer keys)

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