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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 does this trip make Julia feel?

2. Who is Richard Rainsferd?

3. When did Gaspard DuFaure find out that Sarah was a Jewish refugee?

4. What does Franck Lévy tell Julia Jaramond about the family at 26 rue de Saintonge in July 1942?

5. What does Julia tell Bertrand about the baby?

Short Essay Questions

1. Describe the meeting with William Rainsferd.

2. What does Julia learn about Sarah during her trip to Orléans.

3. What does the narrator say Julia is troubled by?

4. What does Eduard send to Julia, and what does she learn from it?

5. Describe Julia arrival at the Rainsferds house.

6. What is the tone of the book, up to the point of Julia finding out about Sarah from Eduard?

7. Where doe Julia travel to in the U.S. in her search for Sarah?

8. What does Julia learn from Sarah's wedding announcement?

9. What is Bertrand's response when he hears that Julia is not aborting the baby?

10. What point in the development of the plot does this moment signify?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Would you recommend "Sarah's Key"? For what purposes would you recommend "Sarah's Key", and what kinds of readers would you not recommend it? What book would you recommend that would cover the same material or provide the same emotional experience in a different way?

Essay Topic 2

Julia is dismayed by the ignorance surrounding Drancy and Vel d'Hiv', and she finds small plaques commemorating what took place there, but mostly she finds that people have moved on, and either do not remember or do not care about the past. What do you think is an appropriate form of memorializing the events of the roundup and the Holocaust? When is it appropriate for a place to 'move on' and when is it appropriate that should time remain stopped at the moment of the atrocities?

Essay Topic 3

The ending of "Sarah's Key" gets a bit chaotic, as a lot of family drama comes to a head, and Julia's marriage ends, and her mother-in-law dies after the big realization that the Tézac family was related to Sarah's story. Evaluate the proposition that this jumble of action and plot resolution is a flaw in the novel, and that the convolutions dispel the force of the realizations. Does this book end up being about Julia's marriage and in-law family drama, with Sarah's story being just dressing?

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