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, and 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 novel over the course of your response that serve as examples and support.

1. Spaz, the protagonist and narrator of The Last Book in the Universe, is a teenage boy with epilepsy.

• Why do you think the author chose to focus this text on a young adult with a neurological condition? (topic sentence)
• How did the author’s decision to make Spaz “different” affect the text? Analyze at least 3 moments in the text where Spaz’s differences help him gain special insight into a problem or issue.
• In your conclusion, discuss how Spaz’s condition empowers him by enabling him to process the world differently. With Spaz’s powers of recollection, he becomes a conduit toward a more cohesive society, engaging the book’s larger message about Memory’s Impact on Society.

2. Rather than writing a realistic book set on Earth at the time of its publication, the author wrote a dystopian novel set several hundred years in the future, after a cataclysmic event.