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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. Which of the following best characterizes the way Jean's mother sees the world?

2. What does Jean's mother see in a child when she decided she wanted one?

3. What does Jean find one day when she is looking for a pack of cards?

4. What does Jean's mother do to get at the "heathens" who live next door?

5. In Jean's dream of getting married, who is her husband?

Short Essay Questions

1. When the Society has a special conference in Jean's town, what does Jean's mother make her do? Who does Jean meet there?

2. Who is the prince in the story, and what does he believe he wants?

3. How is Jean's deafness discovered?

4. Who invites Jean to go to the seaside? What happens and why does her mother not let her?

5. Describe a typical Sunday in Jean's home.

6. In the beginning of the chapter, Leviticus, what do Jean and her mother hear coming from Next Door? What do they do about it?

7. In an attempt to fit in at school, what does Jean change about her art projects? How does that go?

8. What happens the first time Melanie goes to Jean's church?

9. How does Jean get to go the fair once a year? What happens to her there one year with a palm reader?

10. When she is young and still trying to understand men and marriage, what is Jean's general opinion of men? Where does it come from?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

An entire chapter of the novel is dedicated to discussion of stories and history in general being subjective.

Part 1. What is meant by subjectivity in history?

Part 2. How subjective is history? Are there any true things to be found and proven?

Part 3. How do people best cope with the subjective nature of looking into the past?

Essay Topic 2

The action of the novel happens in a community of Pentecostal Evangelists, and the conflict in the story is caused by their beliefs.

Part 1. Who are the Pentecostal Evangelists, and what do they believe in?

Part 2. Have they changed since the 1960s when this story took place?

Part 3. What would it be like to be raised in such a community?

Essay Topic 3

At the end of one of the chapters in the book, the author includes a brief description of a historical moment of the storming of the Winter Palace. It adds depth to her story because although she shows us just a moment of relative inaction, the reader knows the outcome of the historical moment and so gets a hint of a possible outcome for her story.

Part 1. What was the storming of the Winter Palace that she referred to, and how did it relate to her story?

Part 2. Choose a pivotal moment in your own life that you can somehow equate with a moment in history. What was the moment in your life? What historical moment?

Part 3. Analyze how the moment of your own life is comparable to that moment in history, and what does representing that moment in history bring to your own story?

(see the answer keys)

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