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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. After witnessing a character vomiting, where does Sissie wish that she was?

2. What type of innocence would be considered a theme in the book?

3. In Part 2, where is Frank?

4. Who joins Sissie's family as they sit in the first summer?

5. Where is Sissie sitting when she plays a game in her first summer at the tavern?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Sissie compare the bar at the end of the book to the same bar years earlier?

2. How does the writer make the summer season very apparent in the text in Part 2?

3. Why do Sissie's parents argue in Part 3? How does it make Sissie feel?

4. What causes Sissie to feel suffocated in the final part of the book?

5. How is the idea of life and death explored in the text in part 1?

6. What has changed in Sissie's life between the first two summers narrated?

7. What message about marriage does Sissie pass on?

8. What is Sissie afraid of in Part 1?

9. Why does Sissie say that her father looks like a stranger?

10. Describe Sissie, the narrator, as she is first introduced.

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What role does the idea of image versus reality play in the book? What does Sissie imagine the world to be? In truth, how does the world differ? How does this affect Sissie's life?

Essay Topic 2

What role does the literary device parallelism play a role in the story? Compare and contrast each of the four summers to each other.

Essay Topic 3

In what ways is Sissie similar and different to her mother? How is Jesse comparable to Sissie's father? What predictions can the reader make based on these commonalities?

(see the answer keys)

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