View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What are the descriptions of Bird House in the Epilogue meant to convey?

2. In her February 15th email, what does Lorelei reveal about her plan to come visit Jim?

3. What is the name of Meg's youngest child?

4. In 2005, what does Lorelei do for the first time in decades?

5. What does Lorelei blame her respiratory illness on?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Lorelei tell Jim about the trauma in her own childhood?

2. What caused Meg to kick Bill out in 2003, and what was the result?

3. When the first floor of the house is completely cleaned out, what does Meg realize about Lorelei and the past?

4. When Colin proposes to come see Rory in Thailand, which details of his life does Rory share, and which details does he keep to himself until the first night of Colin's visit?

5. During Beth's September, 2006 visit to England, what contrast is there between her attitude toward the affair and Bill's?

6. What evidence does Kayleigh cite when she calls Beth and Meg "heartless bitches" (305)?

7. What cruel irony does Meg see in what she was doing herself at the time of Lorelei's death?

8. When Colin first meets Owen, how does Rory perceive the encounter, and what does this demonstrate about Rory?

9. When Rory arrives at Bird House in Chapter 14, how do his feelings about Lorelei and the house contrast with his memories of his childhood feelings?

10. What is Lorelei's explanation to Jim regarding why she is always hungry?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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.

Essay Topic 2

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 3

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.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,224 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample