View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the only sound Peggy hears at night when she and Karen move into the shack?

2. How does the narrator characterize the persona Peggy acquired in high school?

3. When did Karen Brown die?

4. Why does Peggy not want to go to a judge to get a divorce?

5. Who was it that got Peggy to see that she was “intended to be a man” (3)?

Short Essay Questions

1. What was it that caused Lee’s “irreplaceable VW Thing” to end up in the lake (29)?

2. How would you explain the humor of Mislaid?

3. What does the narrator mean when she says that “Lee’s sex life was a lot like Byrdie’s” (102)?

4. What is Peggy’s role as faculty wife like?

5. Where does the narrator see Mireille’s “spiritual kinship” with Lee (86)?

6. How does the narrator know Meg is burdened by the lies she tells Karen?

7. What is the basis of Lee and Peggy’s attraction?

8. How does Zink describe Mireille’s relationship with her father?

9. What is Lomax’ background?

10. What is Byrdie’s effect on his classmates in high school?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

When is Mislaid most itself? What is its characteristic passage, or moment? What makes that moment or passage the most representative of the book as a whole? Are there any places where the book seems to depart from its typical self, as if to become a different book?

Essay Topic 2

Who is the audience for Mislaid? What is the ideal reader for Mislaid likely to think about the book’s main topics? How does this book try to affect the reader? What is it trying to teach him or her, or get him or her to do?

Essay Topic 3

Identify the most important plot points in Mislaid. What is at stake in each of these moments? What possibilities do these moments present, and how are those possibilities channeled into specific actions or events? How does the plot chart its course among other alternative or possible plots?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,025 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample