book review: When Mystical Creatures Attack! by Kathleen Founds
The backstory: When Mystical Creatures Attack! won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and is 2014 New York Times Notable book . The basics: "Told through high school class assignments, letters, emails, private journal entries, school literary magazine submissions, advice column blog posts, and psychiatric wellness reports, the 25 linked stories in this debut collection beautifully sketch the lives of residents of a small South Texas town."- Publishers Weekly My thoughts: First: whoever called this book a short story collection has a very, very narrow view of what a novel is. To me, linked stories may share characters and settings, either across some stories or all. When Mystical Creatures Attack! has three main characters, and one of each is the main character in each story (I would say chapter.) It's certainly not a traditional novel, as the description indicates. It doesn't unfold in a chronological narrative. But, to me, it's definitely a novel, even if man...