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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. Where do Julia and Guillaume make a trip to?

2. How do the DuFaures respond to what Sarah tells them?

3. What do the DuFaures insist to the police?

4. What did Julia receive from the person she met at the nursing home?

5. Who is Gaspard DuFaure?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Julia's pregnancy affect her feelings about Sarah's history?

2. What is Julia's state of mind as she plans to travel to Tuscany?

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

4. What clue remains unexplored even after Julia finds out that Sarah died?

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

6. What does Julia decide to do about her pregnancy and her marriage?

7. Describe Julia's trip to Drancy.

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

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

10. What happens to Julia after her meeting with William Rainsferd?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

How well made is "Sarah's Key" as a novel? Is it tight, with artful use of theme, motif, metaphor and imagery? Or does it wander, with images and themes coming up and disappearing over time? Does the novel's construction seem deliberate and artful or something else?

Essay Topic 2

Debate the proposition that the parallel de Rosnay draws between the end of a woman's marriage and the death of a child's little brother in the Holocaust is offensive and demeaning to the experience of those who died in Europe in the 1940s. Or is it a way of honoring the depth of human emotion?

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?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 934 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample