Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

 

For our March bookclub, we read Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn. (We missed you Rebecca!) In the book, a quaint little community lives on an island called Nollop, named after Nevin Nollop who wrote the famous sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." At the center of town is a statue of Nollop with the sentence displayed on a series of tiles, one for each letter. One fateful day, the tile with the letter z falls and the governing council interprets this event as Nollop wanting its citizens to creatively play with language and not use the letter in spoken or written form. As letters keep falling the council continues to decree law after law preventing citizens from communicating with the dropped letters (illicitabeticals). Can Ella Minnow Pea, a young woman native to the island, save her small nation from the inevitable?

Many liked this playful book, although we also admitted that it was difficult to read either at the beginning getting into the writer's style or in the middle when letters really start flying off the statue forcing contrived circumlocution. For example, instead of saying, "chewing the guy out," the author would write "letting loose with a veritable, vituperative salvo." Those who finished the book appreciated the clever ending.

We discussed literary elements such as the techniques of writing the novel as a series of letters and how some characters repeated words for emphasis which is observed in other languages such as Hawaiian and Turkish. We imagined that the author probably got the idea of the book after attempting to write a similar sentence containing every letter of the alphabet or by writing a computer program to do so. 

Aside from the book, we discussed many other topics including covid, vaccines, school, mental health, parents, crazy weather, teenager slang, etc. Last year was not easy, and the beginning of this year is proving to be the same. We continue to be thankful for having each other.