Title: Ella Minnow Pea
Author: Mark Dunn
Ella Minnow Pea is a story written in letters (Griffin and Sabine, anyone?). It takes place on the fictional island-nation of Nollop, located off the coast of South Carolina. When letters start dropping off the statue constructed to honor the creator of the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," the use of those letters becomes forbidden. You may see how it would get tricky to write without letters of the alphabet. Anyway, the protagonist (named Ella Minnow Pea-- get it?) is in a race to find a more concise sentence that contains all of the letters of the alphabet before the statue drops all of its characters.
I love the premise of this book. The actual book? Not so much-- and I feel sort of guilty about it. It just felt to me like Dunn was so concerned with the gimmick of the novel that there wasn't a lot of character development. I know that there were two young girls who were cousins who wrote the majority of the letters, but their characters were fairly indistinguishable to me. Still, it gave me pause to think about totalitarian regimes and writing-- a theme I visited long ago when reading Farenheigh 451, which it reminded me of, in sort of a strange way.
--originally published 5/28/07
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