Ella Minnow Pea

[goodreads]

Title: Ella Minnow Pea
Author: Mark Dunn
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 208
Date read: December 2006, October 2022

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island's Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl's fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.


The summary says it all. This book is absolutely hilarious, reading how Ella slowly learns to substitute words as more and more letters are banned. 'Day' becomes 'sun-to-sun' when 'd' disappears and then 'night-to-night' when 'u' disappears. Lovely book and a quick read. I read it in one sitting - didn't take more than an hour or two.

Reread 2022: Downgraded this from 5 stars to 3 stars on my second read-through. I don't know... it just didn't work for me this time around. It's still clever, but just didn't manage to live up to my own expectations.