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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. Why does Nell text Francie and Colette to turn on the Patricia Faith show right away?

2. Who was the father in Francie's first pregnancy?

3. What does the text's description of Winnie's home establish about her?

4. Why does Nell's partner object to the babysitter Nell hired?

5. What was the subject of Colette's first book?

Short Essay Questions

1. How do the Prologue and Chapter One characterize the narrator?

2. Why does Francie bring a camera with her to the park in Chapter 10?

3. How does Bodhi Mogaro's attorney explain away the evidence against Mogaro?

4. When she is being questioned by the police, what does Nell have a hazy and disturbing memory of?

5. How do Chapters One through Three characterize Nell?

6. When Colette arrives home after her run in Chapter Eight, what do she and Charlie argue about?

7. When Colette is at the park in Chapter Eight, what secret desire is she thinking about, and what stops her from trying to obtain it?

8. How does Chapter One hint at trouble in the narrator's childhood?

9. In Chapter Nine, what has changed about the narrator's situation?

10. When the narrator is pacing inside her house, what memory does she recall, wondering if it was a hallucination?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

How does the time ordering of the novel's opening--the prologue, Chapter One, and Chapter Two--create suspense and dramatic irony that increase reader engagement with the novel's characters and its central puzzle? Write an essay in which you describe this time order and then analyze the impact that it has on the reader. Discuss the choice to begin in medias res, the use of flash-forward, the revelations that create suspense and dramatic irony, and how these techniques increase the reader's interest in the characters and the events they are caught up in. Support your assertions with evidence drawn from throughout the novel's opening; be sure to cite any quoted evidence in MLA format.

Essay Topic 2

Which conventions of the domestic thriller does Molloy observe? Which does she ignore or even actively subvert? How do these choices impact the reader? What messages might Molloy be trying to convey through these choices? Write an essay in which you consider the expectations a reader has of domestic thrillers and what Molloy accomplishes through fulfilling some of these expectations but not others. Support your assertions with evidence drawn from throughout the text; be sure to cite any quoted evidence and evidence drawn from outside sources in MLA format.

Essay Topic 3

Molloy's novel introduces readers to women from strikingly different walks of life, with strikingly different personalities, and posits that they would all have similar difficulty adjusting to motherhood. How realistic is this message? What research-supported evidence is there about women's adjustment to motherhood and the difficulty of taking care of a newborn's needs? What does research show about the differential impacts of parenthood on women versus men? Is this picture changing in modern times, or does parenthood continue to impact women in different ways than it impacts men? Write an essay that considers how accurately Molloy's novel depicts the most common experiences of new mothers in our society. Support your assertions with evidence drawn from throughout the text; be sure to cite any quoted evidence and evidence drawn from outside sources in MLA format.

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