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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. In Part 2, where is Frank?

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

3. Who becomes angry with a woman when she offers something to Sissie during the first summer?

4. Which of the following is offered to Sissie by a woman in the first summer?

5. In the second summer, what type of insect is described as hovering around tables?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. What is Sissie afraid of in Part 1?

4. In what way has the narration matured in the second summer that Sissie narrates?

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

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

7. In what way does the diction change between the first summer and second summer?

8. Describe the island that Sissie and Jerry explore.

9. How does Sissie's mother's appearance make her angry?

10. What makes Sissie vulnerable?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

How do Sissie's feelings about her father change over the course of the narration? How does the reader know that Sissie's feelings about her father are changing? Analyze her feelings for her mother in the same way.

Essay Topic 2

In what way is loss of innocence a theme in the story? What causes Sissie to lose her innocence? How does she lose innocence progressively in each section of the story?

Essay Topic 3

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

(see the answer keys)

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