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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 does Rory decide is the only good thing about having had a baby?

2. When Meg comes home for Easter the year she moves out, what is she especially angry to find that Lorelei has stored in her room?

3. Which item that Lorelei collected as a child seems to disturb Meg the most?

4. What surprise does Vicky arrange for Lorelei during Easter of 1999?

5. When two teenagers break into Bird House and rob it, what does Lorelei compare the event to?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Colin end up as Lorelei's next-door neighbor?

2. When Molly asks Meg whether she would have liked Rhys,what is Meg's response?

3. What sign of growth does Lorelei show in her New Years email to Jim?

4. How does Rory's new friend inspire him to make a change in his life?

5. Based on Lorelei's emails, what seems to be true about her own childhood and its impact on the way she parents her own children?

6. How does the robbery at Bird House end Colin's dream of going to Greece?

7. What is Alfie's full name, and what is its significance?

8. What foreshadowing alerts the reader that something terrible has happened between Meg and Beth?

9. What does Rory think is Lorelei's way of dealing with Rhys's death?

10. How does Beth's relationship with Jason result from the actions of other people in Beth's life?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

The title of this novel focuses the reader's attention on Bird House itself. Why? How does the title relate to the book's theme? Write an essay that analyzes the book's title and Bird House's central relationship to the book's concerns with family, generational dysfunction, renewal, and personal growth. Support your assertions with evidence drawn from throughout the text.

Essay Topic 2

What relationship does the novel posit between a failure to understand your own needs and a failure to understand the needs of others? How does this relationship illuminate something important about Lorelei's and Colin's parenting? Write an essay in which you show the ways in which Lorelei and Colin fail to understand their own needs and then suggest how this lack of understanding of how to prioritize needs impacted their parenting. Discuss what the Bird children really needed in their childhoods, what Lorelei and Colin offered them, and how the gap between these impacted the Bird children.

Essay Topic 3

Consider all of Lorelei's emails as a single body of text. How do they demonstrate her growth? How does knowing that Lorelei is capable of change impact the reader's feelings about how her story ends? How does it affect the reader's feelings about other characters in the story? Write an essay that makes and defends a claim about the impact that seeing Lorelei's growth has on the reader, connecting this to the book's larger ideas about family and character. Support your assertions with evidence drawn from throughout the text.

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