Pieces of a Novel Puzzle “A novel or a collection of short stories?” may be a question that a critic asks about Rattlebone. Maxine Clair portrays both arguments with her energetic writing style. A blend of random comments and many unique phrases intermix with the intense plot. Writing like this gives the reader a more relaxed state and the book seems more alive and real. In answer to the critique question, Maxine Clair is writing a novel because of an abundant supply of foreshadowing, a collection of narrators, a recurrence of characters, and a process commonly known to man as aging. Suggesting that Rattlebone is in fact a novel, foreshadowing occurred in several places during the b