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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 what month does Latif die?

2. In which city does Latif secure a position after first coming to the United States?

3. In what year do the Awan’s move to Peshawar?

4. Which of the following is among the books Asma gives the narrator?

5. What award does the narrator note his play receives?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does the narrator come to learn is the intent behind questions about whether his play is autobiographical?

2. Why does Sikander rail against Naseem after he and the narrator leave Abbottabad?

3. How does Asma define the Nero complex?

4. What does Fatima expect will be Anjum’s fate, and what actually does happen to Anjum?

5. In what does the narrator report having seen the good in the United States during his youth?

6. In what properties does Sikander invest when he tries to break into real estate?

7. With what events listed in the novel’s chronology is Trump involved?

8. What conspiracies does the narrator note hearing voiced while visiting family in Abbottabad in 2008?

9. What does the narrator cite as major disagreements his mother has with the idea of American exceptionalism that his father espouses?

10. What, other than seeing Latif, does the narrator note softened his mother’s demeanor?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Explicate the following simile: “Like his debt load, Trump’s waistline ballooned” (3).

Essay Topic 2

Asma asserts that “A day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life” (62). Is the assertion correct? What in the novel and in experience says that it is or is not? How does it do so?

Essay Topic 3

Consider the quote from Montaigne’s “Of Experience” the narrator presents: “I take it for true that dreams are honest reflections of our inclinations; but there is art to making sense of them” (104). What is meant by the quote? What from the narrator indicates that meaning? How does it do so?

(see the answer keys)

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