Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I better include the blurb for this one.
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,* โThe quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.โ Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the islandโs 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 girlโs fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.
*pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet
~~~
Correspondence is the only way this story is told. Letters between friends and family tell the story.
So many creative writing ideas are presented in this book. As I mentioned, letter writing is one. Another emerges as bits of the alphabet are outlawed. Try writing without certain letters.
What I loved was how vocabulary improved with fewer letters. But towards the end, subletters are needed, ph is F, etc. Sometimes, it takes a moment to figure out the new word. So, how would you write if you couldn’t use certain letters?
At first, I tried to read the book through the Libby app. But I found I just couldn’t track properly to stay with it. So, I bought the Kindle version with Whispersync. That worked very well. There are several actors reading. That gave the story an even bigger boost. As the new words were formed, having Kindle set up with a larger font and spacing helped me understand the words presented. The readers were excellent at ensuring the reader/listener knew the word was spelled incorrectly, but the contents connected the communication.
I highly recommend this book for fun and creativity.
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