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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. By which of the following items do Sissie's brothers wait?

2. Which of the following is offered to Sissie by a woman in the first summer?

3. How does Sissie describe Jerry's shoes?

4. How does Sissie feel when she sees children throwing things at the stuck bird?

5. Which of the following describes the setting of the book?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does the reader know that time has passed between Part 2 and Part 3?

2. What makes Sissie vulnerable?

3. Describe the family dynamic in Sissie's household.

4. Why does Sissie get angry when she sees the mysterious man at the bar as an adult?

5. When Sissie sees her father throwing up, why is she afraid?

6. Is Sissie powerless the first summer? Why or why not?

7. Why is Sissie horrified when she sees the bird stuck in the scum on the water?

8. Describe Sissie's physical retreat in Part 3.

9. How does Sissie's mother's appearance make her angry?

10. How does Sissie compare the bar at the end of the book to the same bar years earlier?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What role does the literary device parallelism play a role in the story? Compare and contrast each of the four summers to each other.

Essay Topic 2

How do Sissie's feelings about her father change over the course of the narration? How does the reader know that Sissie's feelings about her father are changing? Analyze her feelings for her mother in the same way.

Essay Topic 3

What role does the idea of image versus reality play in the book? What does Sissie imagine the world to be? In truth, how does the world differ? How does this affect Sissie's life?

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