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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. Which of the May Mothers gets very upset when she sees the former Secretary of State being interviewed on television?

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

3. In Chapter Eight, when Nell recalls deleting the Peek-a-Boo app from Winnie's phone, how does she characterize her own actions?

4. What does Nell claim not to remember about the night at the bar?

5. What does Francie decide about the identity of the man she sees come out of Winnie's building in Chapter Ten?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Francie mention having seen on Patricia Faith's television show, and how does Nell react?

2. How do Chapters One through Three characterize Francie?

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

4. How do the narrative perspective and point of view shift from the Prologue through Chapter Three?

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

6. What does Francie remember about Mr. Colburn, her high school science teacher?

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

8. When the police arrive at Nell's to question her, what memory from her past temporarily confuses her?

9. 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?

10. While Colette is out running in Chapter Eight, what source of comfort is she wishing for, and why can she not get it?

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

What messages about female friendship are conveyed in The Perfect Mother? How do these messages relate to the novel's concerns with marginalization and the role of women in American society? How does the novel portray the complexity of friendship, and which aspects of friendship does it seem to value most? Write an essay that takes and defends a position about the messages this novel conveys about friendship among women. Support your assertions with evidence drawn from throughout the text; be sure to cite any quoted evidence in MLA format.

Essay Topic 3

For much of the book, the reader is meant to suspect that the first-person narrator is Winnie Ross. To what extent does this misdirection depend on Winnie's private nature and the tendency of others to project their own ideas onto the blank canvas of Winnie's introversion? How does this relate to the book's concerns with perspective? Does the book's art depend on the reader being just as culpable as the characters in the process of making assumptions about Winnie? Write an essay that affirms, refutes, or qualifies the following statement: "In The Perfect Mother, Aimee Molloy is able to mislead readers about the first-person narrator's identity by deliberately making Winnie hard to know and encouraging her readers to make the same kinds of assumptions about Winnie as other characters do." Support your assertions with evidence drawn from throughout the text; be sure to cite any quoted evidence in MLA format.

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