Use these essay questions as writing and critical thinking exercises for all levels of writers, and to build their literary analysis skills by requiring textual references throughout the essay.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English learners or struggling writers, strategies that work well include graphic organizers, sentence frames or starters, group work, or oral responses.

Scaffolded Essay Questions

Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the below bulleted outlines. Cite details from the text over the course of your response that serve as examples and support.

1. Although the story has many different narrators, the three children do not tell their own stories.

• How does mainly using third-person narration throughout the text impact how the reader feels about or understands the story? (topic sentence)
• Give three examples from the story that support your idea about how the third-person narration affects the reader.
• In your concluding sentence or sentences, show how the impact you described supports the novel’s thematic concern with The Power of Difference, Storytelling as Unity, or Reckoning with Complexity.

2. Each of the children has special abilities or characteristics. Ironically, the circumstances in which they live mean that their greatest strengths are sometimes what cause them to be rejected and persecuted.

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