Adri handed me this little book one day thinking I'd like it because she knows how I love words. I guess all those crossword puzzles over the years count for something! She was right. I loved the book! The back cover summarizes the novel in letters as follows: 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 phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet, "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 from freedom of expression and a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.
The whole peek into this fictitious time and place was through the letters that the characters wrote and mailed to each other. I was amazed at how I was pulled into the story and was SOooooo frustrated as letters were removed or altered from conversation. I talk too much anyway and would surely have been banned from Nollopville were some of my overflowingly conversational tidbits censored. I'm grateful for all 26 letters of the alphabet...and for this delightful book! Read it!
1 comment:
Agreed. It had me giggling in parts because of the creative ways employed by the characters to skirt the harshly enforced rules and still say what they needed to say. If you like words and word plays, you'll like this book!
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