Ella Minnow Pea

I read Ella Minnow Pea last week. This is one of those books that I see every time I go to the bookstore and think, Wow, I should really get that. So I did. And it was AWESOME. I loved it.
Ella Minnow Pea is a story about a girl named, naturally, Ella Minnow Pea. She lives on the island of Nollop, named after Nevin Nollop, the man who coined the phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." It is a tiny independent nation in love with language, but all hell breaks loose when letters start falling off the statue of Nevin Nollop - and the town elders take this as a sign that those letters should be removed from language altogether... and to the delight of gimmicks everywhere, author Mark Dunn drops those letters from the novel. It's pretty incredible. The first letter to fall (don't worry, I'm not ruining anything for you) is Z - not incredibly dramatic, given its minimal usage - but then falls Q, then D, then J... and soon all manner of bad things happen. Can Ella save her town, her nation, and the English language?

Also noteworthy is this is an epistolary novel. Wow, look at the new word I know! This means that the whole novel is written in letter form - letter as in "Dear Cousin Ella." It's very fun, and I like it.

Ella Minnow Pea - A-