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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 is the name of Jamie's hometown?

2. What is Allie making for Cam and Mia?

3. What does Mia do with the first note she writes to Cam?

4. Why was Mia lonely during her childhood?

5. Where does Cam run into Mia in Chapter 6?

Short Essay Questions

1. What important information does Maggie's best friend tell Allie?

2. Why does Angus McDonald leave Scotland and move to Wheelock?

3. What does Allie learn about Maggie's condition from her doctor?

4. What does Allie offer to do while Jamie goes into the police station with Cam after he confesses to murder?

5. What is Jamie's occupation and how did it involve Maggie?

6. What kind of wife is Allie to Cam?

7. What is significant about the first picnic Allie and Cam had together?

8. In the opening of the novel, what does the woman do after her husband comes home to a house that has been emptied of his possessions?

9. Why does Cam have more influence in Wheelock than a typical police chief?

10. Why did Jamie come to Wheelock to kill Maggie?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What are Cam's contradictory convictions and how does he struggle with them throughout the novel? Does he finally resolve them by the end of the story?

Essay Topic 2

Why does Picoult begin the novel with these lines from a William Carlos Williams poem: "What power has love but forgiveness?/ In other words/ by its intervention/ what has been done/ can be undone./ What good is it otherwise?" What is the significance of these words to the plot and themes of Mercy? What is the difference between forgiveness and mercy?

Essay Topic 3

How did Allie and Cam evolve as characters from the beginning of the novel to the end?

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