give details including characters, setting, situation, and possible conflict and tell us how this information might be helpful in understanding the novel better.
predict what might have happened to tea cake.
The exposition of the novel is essentially everything that's important. You need to know who your characters are; does the setting change from one scene to the next, does the setting effect the characters, so on and so forth.
Conflicts are revealed, rising action is experienced, and the climax should culminate into something that maybe you have predicted, but maybe not exactly the way you predicted it.
We know we're in the rural south; we know from the beginning that Janie will be a sympathetic character...... we like her, and we feel for her bad decisions. The men in her life were mistakes, but not for the reasons we would assume. She loves them all in her own way.... right or wrong. She loves Teacake, but it all goes wrong. We see him as a jerk; she see him as a bad boy and wants to believe in him. Unfortunately, she can't.
I don't think we're meant to be able to predict everything...... if we could, books would simply be ordinary and predictible. If we'd known Janie was going to kill Teacake, the climax wouldn't have been climactical...... and it is.
