Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

by Mark Dunn

Paperback, 2002

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Doubleday Anchor Books (2002), Edition: First Edition, Paperback, 224 pages

Description

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, "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 for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

User reviews

LibraryThing member richardderus

Well-loved books from my past

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Book Description: There are two book descriptions, both good; this first is for the hardcover, published by MacAdam/Cage, that I read years ago:
Ella Minnow Pea is an epistolary novel set in the fictional island of Nollop situated off the coast

of South Carolina and home to the inventor of the pangram The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog. Now deceased, the islanders have erected a monument to honor their hero, but one day a tile with the letter z falls from the statue. The leaders interpret the falling tile as a message from beyond the grave and the letter is banned from use. On an island where the residents pride themselves on their love of language, this is seen as a tragedy. They are still reeling from the shock, when another tile falls and then another.... Mark Dunn takes us on a journey against time through the eyes of Ella Minnow Pea and her family as they race to find another phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet to save them from being unable to communicate. Eventually, the only letters remaining are LMNOP, when Ella finally discovers the phrase that will save their language.

The second is for Anchor's trade paper edition, which seems to me to give a better flavor of the book:
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,* “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 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

My Review: Delight. Dialogue, description, the lot. It's fun to read the book because the story is so very absurd. Imagine an entire country that's established around the veneration of a weirdo who invented a sentence to exercise your typing skills with! And imagine further the populace of such a place, held in thrall to language, ruled by a council of puritans who do their damnedest to make sure the entire island respects the gift of the English language...to the exclusion of all other considerations, personal, practical, political.

The book was published in 2001. That was, for those of failing memory, the year (in my never-humble opinion) Shrub Bush stole the presidential election for the first time. It was clear to anyone not conservative and/or christian that there was a bad set of rapids ahead, and a lot of it would turn on public and private discourse, its nature and its tenor. The novel foretold the increasing gag effect imposed from Above on reporting and discussing the various wars, the various and nefarious doings in and around the Oval Office, and on and on. Dunn could see it coming, and he pointed and hollered the best way he could, via a highbrow high-concept novel that would fly above heads and under radars.

I lapped it up like it was the dust on the mirror and began begging people I knew to read it, even buying several of them copies. (I had a good job in those days.) And to my increasing despair, not ONE of them so much as read it until poked; after reading it, not one of them was even lukewarm.

Ella and her family living like Anne Frank and her family, Ella making the discovery of a new pangram, Ella obeying the lipogrammatic tyranny of the Council in her letters to those who have left, escaped, the madness engulfing Nollop...this was sunshine and I was heliotropic in following it wherever it led. And not one soul to keep me company.

And now, eleven years on, someone reviews it, and I am all back in the fray. Please, do everyone involved a favor and get a copy so you can revel in the pleasures of an honorable woman telling a surreal, Dali-and-Kafka-have-a-baby kind of story and, in the end, revel with her in the joy of open and free speech.

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24 more

LibraryThing member atimco

Ella Minnow Pea is a fun little fable of wordplay gone wrong. On the tiny island of Nollop a few miles off the coast of South Carolina, a word-loving community lives, reverencing its founder, Nevin Nollop, who came up with the fateful 35-letter sentence that uses all 26 letters of the alphabet.

The

quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

For this piece of genius, Nollop is given almost-religious worship among the Nollopians. When a letter tile falls from the monument commemorating his famous sentence, the High Council determines that it is the Spirit of Nollop telling them to excise the letter from their speech and writing. The Nollopians are hesitant but compliant; Z isn't a terrible letter to lose, after all. But that's just the beginning of the madness.

I enjoyed the epistolary nature of the story (though honestly, was it necessary for Dunn to define "epistolary" for us at the start of the book?). The subtitle, "A Novel in Letters," is punnishly clever. The story becomes difficult to read (in a playful way) as more and more letters become illegal. Eventually the novel starts looking like chatspeak... perish the thought!

I'm unsure how to take this book. On one hand it's a lighthearted romp full of clever teasing and fun. But there are darker aspects; some characters die, there is public flogging for using a banned letter, and more than once I felt that Dunn was trying to make this a parable about religion, which doesn't sit particularly well with me. Certainly it's a sharp comment on totalitarian regimes and censorship.

The denouément is just right. Cute's probably the word I want. Still, once you know the outcome I doubt there is much incentive to reread. It's a clever, fun little book but somehow it falls a touch flat. Eh.

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LibraryThing member AMQS

This was a really fun read, full of very clever wordplay -- a novel of letters (double meaning here) and how our language is affected by letters and their use or restriction, with a sinister undercurrent of censorship and corruption in a totalitarian state. The story's events take place on a

fictional island devoted to Nevin Nollop, the author of the sentence 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,' which uses all 26 letters of the alphabet. When letters from the sentence begin to fall off of a statue of Nollop, the Powers That Be on the island decide it is probably Nollop speaking to them from the beyond, and they decide to prohibit the use of any fallen letters either in speech or writing. The book is epistolary, and the residents writing letters to each other must become increasingly creative to avoid using any forbidden letters. I attempted this myself at the point in the book when Z, Q, J, and D were forbidden, and was quite challenged! I wish this book had been published when I was in high school -- my logophile friends and I would have been all over it:)

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LibraryThing member fyrefly98

Summary: The small island nation of Nollop, just off the coast of South Carolina, holds itself as more educated and lexically-minded than their non-islander counterparts, thanks to the influence of Nevin Nollop, their founder and the (fictitious) creater of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps

over the lazy dog." However, when letters of that sentence begin falling from the Nollop statue at town center, the High Council decrees that it is a sign from Nollop from the afterlife, and that these letters are no longer to be written or spoken by Nollopians - on pain of banishment. Ultimately, it's left to Ella and her family and friends to create a shorter pangram and thus prove that Nollop is no God, and that the free use of language should reign supreme.

Review: Very, very clever; very, very sharp; and yet very funny and quite easy to read. It's a short book - 200-odd pages in length, but in reality less, because even short letters between Ella and her correspondents get their own page. It's a fairly simple story, but the language is used to brutal but dazzling effect - you have to parse between real but unfamiliar vocabulary and Nollopisms, you start to train your eye to watch out for slips of "forbidden" letters, start counting letters in pangrams, and start imagining your own life where you're unable to speak without mentally spelling out each word first. In between all of the clever wordplay, though, there's a sharp satire that deals with the freedom of language and how it's related to the freedom of thought; with the dangers of oligarchy, especially when religion takes over for science and common sense; and with the reactions of ordinary people when their government no longer becomes trustworthy. The only minor things that kept this book from being perfect were that the characters seemed to struggle over-much with finding under-40-letter pangrams (Nollop's has 35, and can easily be cut to 33 by replacing one of the "the"s with an "a"), and that there were a few romantic story threads that weren't well-developed and so seemed slightly out of place. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Engaging, quick, and fun book that holds some very potent points about freedom and the power of language, and makes you feel smarter just by reading it. Highly recommended.

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LibraryThing member _Zoe_

I love the concept of this book: letters of the alphabet are being banned one by one, so the book uses fewer and fewer letters as it progresses, and the people are fighting against this governmental oppression.

For the first half I thought it was fantastic, but I was disappointed by a couple of

things later on. First, I expected that as letters were removed the author would continue to use normal spellings, but there came a point when that was given up as too difficult, and the author resorted to using phonetically-similar substitutes. For me, that took a lot of interest out of the book.

Second, a large part of the book revolves around people trying to think of sentences like "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" that use all 26 letters of the alphabet, but are shorter than that one. There would frequently be triumphant claims like "I'm getting closer--I now have a sentence with only 44 letters!", but a closer inspection would reveal that the sentence they supposedly laboured so hard to construct could easily be reduced to a shorter one; for example, it might include a 6-letter adjective containing only one letter that didn't already occur elsewhere in the sentence. A good book should benefit from a closer reading, not suffer from it.

Still, the ending did manage to surprise me, in the best of ways: I felt like I should have seen it coming, but just hadn't been paying close enough attention.

Overall, I would recommend this book: it has an interesting premise, and it's short enough to be worth reading for that alone. The fact that it's an enjoyable read is an added bonus. Although it didn't quite live up to its initial promise, it's still solidly good.

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LibraryThing member TadAD

This quirky, jocund book has been zealously reviewed googleplexes of times.

Ok, just kidding. I won't give up my day job. :-) Without the pangrams...

This book has been reviewed so many times on LT that I don't feel there's much need for me to discuss it at any length. The word-play is the basis for

absolutely everything in this parable about totalitarianism, mostly of the religious sort. Its plot is about par for a late grade-school novel and there's little depth to the characters we meet.

For the first half it was interesting to watch how the elisions were accommodated, the word choices that avoided certain letters. However, by the time Dunn was making awkward phonetic spellings, cute and simple had become cutesy and simplistic…the slight plot and flat characters weren't strong enough to demand the work required of me.

For my taste, this falls into over-hyped and I can only give it a mildest of recommendations due to the interesting idea.

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LibraryThing member riofriotex

Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn, was published in 2001, but is still timely twenty years later. While my paperback copy had the simple subtitle of "A Novel in Letters," the original subtitle on the hardcover was "a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable." While I knew epistolary meant the story

was told via letter-writing, lipogram was a new word for me. A lipogram is a written work composed of words selected so as to avoid the use of one or more letters of the alphabet.

Ella Minnow Pea is a resident of Nollop, an independent (fictional) island off the coast of North Carolina, formerly called Utopianna, whose citizens are "elevating language to a national art form" (from the front matter). In 1904 the name of their country is changed to Nollop, to honor an early resident who devised the well-known "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" pangram (a sentence that uses all letters of a given alphabet at least once).

The phrase is immortalized in tiles on a monument to Nollop. One day the letter Z falls off. The country's leaders think it is a sign from the dead Nollop, and decree that letter is no longer to be used. As more tiles fall, more letters are banned, and citizens have to get creative with their vocabulary (and eventually spelling) in their written and spoken communications to each other. Much of the story is told through letters between Ella and her parents, cousin Tassie and aunt Mittie, and others.

The country loses population as people move away either voluntarily, or via banishment after three offenses of the rules. Ella and a visiting American, Nate, try to convince the leaders that the tiles are falling off due to bad glue, but only succeed in getting them to agree to withdraw the rules if, within a limited time, they can come up with a 32-letter pangram (shorter than Nollop's by three letters - thus eliminating the obvious possibility of just changing one "the" in his sentence to "a"). Down to the deadline and with just five letters left in the alphabet (L, M, N, O, P - get it?), Ella finds a solution in a surprising place.

I really liked this clever book.

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LibraryThing member japaul22

This was a clever little novel that is a long word play game. An island off the East coast of America has always revered language and especially its most honored member, a man named Nollop who created the sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" which uses all the letters of the

alphabet with minimal repetition. A statue to Nollop is in the center of the island and when letters begin falling off of the alphabet printed on the statue, the town council decides that it is a sign from Nollop that they need to challenge themselves linguistically to not speak or write any letter that falls from the statue. There are harsh penalties for anyone who slips up. Since the book is an epistolary novel, the author as well must not use the letters as they disappear.

The idea is clever and it was fun to think about this but definitely the idea was better than the actual book. The word play stays front and center and I never felt much character or plot development though there is an attempt at some. This was fun to read and I'd recommend it, but more as a novelty than anything else.

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LibraryThing member shabacus

A charming book. I bought it for the gee-whiz factor of the concept, a novel in which each the number of available letters of the alphabet grows progressively less as it progresses. I enjoyed it for that, but also strong characterization of the two main protagonists (even through the filter of an

epistolary novel, which can only report action secondhand) and the spot-on analysis of human nature in a growing totalitarian state.

This book is not what I would consider easy reading; even when all letters are available for use, the use of language tends more toward a pseudo-Regency/Victorian pastiche. The epistolary style is not used much anymore, although anyone who enjoyed it here would love it in the excellent Sorcery and Cecelia series by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. Later on, the vocabulary becomes more obtuse, and even spelling surrenders to the necessities of prose.

In all, it was a fun read, but with surprising depth. Recommended for those who see language as something to be played with.

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LibraryThing member Lindoula

Hm, my first impressions are obviously colored by my training as a linguist. The author is clear that in the storyline, people are banned from using certain letters, both in writing and in speech. However, he's not rigorous about applying this. One resident is punished for saying a banished sound,

[z], in certain words because they're spelled with 'z', but at the same time, everyone is using words that contain the sound [z], whether spelled that way or not (such as 'is').

Obviously the point of the book is totalitarianism, but it would still be nice if authors were consistent about language.

The story moves along at a nice pace, but I have to say that the ending is a real disappointment. Not the fact that Enterprise 32 succeeded, but how life just returned to normal instantly. It would've been nice to have some wrap-up, especially about the consequences for the islanders and the Council members.

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LibraryThing member Carmenere

Zany, absurd, witty, charming and clever story about what can happen to an intelligent and content community of islanders when Totalitarianism comes to town. You see, approximately a century ago, the founder of the little island of Nollop, Nevin Nollop, wrote a holoalphabetic sentence which the

islanders have come to hold in the very highest regard and the author almost a sacred genious. Yet, after one hundred and some years something is not holding this sentence together. The High Council of the island takes it upon itself to outlaw the use of Z, to utter it or any other forbidden letter is grounds for corporal punishment, banishment and in some cases death. Soon the freedom to use Q is taken away. Not so much disorder with those two little used letters but when the vowels begin to become illegal a few islanders begin to take action. Yet, nothing can stop this Council from seeing anything other than Nollop's post-humous hand at play, not logic, not human suffering, not intellectual deprivation, nothing until at last the alphabet is reduced to just five letters. Except that is for Ella Minnow Pea. This strong willed and steadfast young lady works until the bitter end to prove that Nollop is not the genious everybody thought he was.
Great characters, well written, novel idea. It's a thought provoking read and I hightly recommend it.

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LibraryThing member siafl

I am not sure I enjoyed this novel as much as I thought I would. I didn't find it as thought-provokingly funny as I assumed that it was, judging by the fact that it's a book about letters, pun used here with every intention.

On the other hand it lasts really about a flash. There's a lot of space so

the two hundred-odd pages are really just about one hundred. It's quite funny at times, in a heart-warming kind of way.

While I see the author's point here, I am not sure I like the fact that he's actually arguing for science against religion. To say that listening to one's beliefs without scientific reason is comparable to scratching letters from the alphabet because of a belief-based interpretation of an omen of some sort is a bit of a stretch for me. Nonetheless I had a good time with this one. It's light and quick, and take the Enterprise-32 challenge!

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LibraryThing member charlie68

A good funny whimsical way to while away a Sunday afternoon. A shorter read than I expected and managed to read in just over a day. English is an amazing language in the way authors can stretch it.

LibraryThing member seekingflight

I have been wanting to read this ever since I read reviews of its premise on Library Thing, but haven't had any luck at any of the public libraries I've consulted. So I finally gave in and bought the kindle version. And it was well worth waiting for ...

The story is set on a fictitious island,

whose most famous citizen is Nevin Nollop, supposedly the creator of the well-known sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", which contains every letter of the alphabet at least once. There's a statue to his memory on the island, where this sentence is proudly inscribed. When tiles from the quote on the memorial start falling, however, the island's government takes this as a message from beyond the grave, and the island's citizens are forbidden to use the relevant letter(s) in either written or spoken language.

The story is not bad as an analogy for might happen with a totalitarian regime, where a ban of the use of the letter z in communication seems foolish and a minor irritation, and then things escalate out of control so quickly that it's impossible to mobilise public opinion until it seems like it's too late.

It's also a celebration of the power of language and communication, and the importance and joy of being able to use the most appropriate word for any given circumstances ...

Very much enjoyed.

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LibraryThing member DeFor

When writing without a few letters of the alphabet, creative linguistic acrobatics become necessary. This book started out with so much unnecessarily odd phrasing, that the change was hardly noticeable.

But when you remove enough letter, it degrades into virtual nonsense. I think that may be why the

author started in the style he did; to show the degradation, and none of the elaboration.

The degradation was about the only thing I found interesting in this book. I would have liked it better if it had ended with the "No mo Nollop poo poo" bit. I found their normal writing style annoying.

Overall, I think this book lacked all subtlety, as well as an interesting story. Perec is so much better.

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LibraryThing member paradoxosalpha

This fable of alphabetic elision seems more urgent now, I think, than even in in the burgeoning days of the so-called Global War on Terror when it was first published. So much of our discourse is now mediated and overruled by algorithms intended to incite and/or placate that a Bureau of Letter

Enforcement seems superfluous--and yet we are more thoroughly surveilled than ever.

The happy ending of the story, while cleverly constructed, rings a Lyttle hollow.

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LibraryThing member Zmrzlina

Clever idea, this little book written in the form of letters between various inhabitants of a small island country named for the man who gave us "A quick red fox jumps over that lazy brown dog." However, the cleverness didn't hold my attention all the ways through. The author resorts to syrupy

sweet love affairs when he could be have more bitter about the predilections of those who claim the authority to tell us what is right and wrong. Still, because of the interesting way the book progresses and the puzzle it presents for readers, I rate it fairly high.

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LibraryThing member Josh_Hanagarne

A great book for anyone interested in words. It's a fun, quick read that gets you thinking about how much of speech is taken for granted, and the effort it would take to completely change the way you communicate.

LibraryThing member mrgan

Gosh, I hate to nitpick a rating, but this is anywhere between 3 and 5 stars depending on how much you're willing to forgive or overlook.

This book features a trapeze act of a premise: chapters eliminate letters progressively, until only a few are left for the characters to use with each other. In

sticking to this restriction, Dunn does great, showing awesome creativity.

However.

This is a book, after all, not a page out of a puzzler column. And as a book, it doesn't really work. The plot he comes up with to justify why the characters must abandon letter after letter is, frankly, ludicrous—which wouldn't be a problem in itself if the wackiness worked with the story. But it doesn't. A loopy fairytale about an island worshipping the inventor of the Quick Brown Fox pangram isn't also a convincing story of life under brutal, censorship-happy tyrants.

Add to that the near uniformity of all the voices we hear, and it's a flatter experience than it ought to be. I shouldn't have to wait until the end of a letter to see its signature and realize who wrote it!

It's an impressive trapeze act, but I can see the wires holding up the performer from a mile away.

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LibraryThing member cemming

All-around clever, Dunn's quirky alphabet-based society is original and riveting. I spent much of my reading time laughing out loud at the notes penned by Ella to pals living elsewhere. Ella's town immortalizes their hero, creator of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" with a

statue in the center of town. When individual letters begin to fall from the statue, the town's idiotic government bans them from use, both written and verbal, providing a challenge to their missive-based society. Dunn counters the challenge in his own writing, using alternate, occasionally mildly inaccurate words and showing the strength of the English language is not just its magnitude but also its specificity.

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LibraryThing member LDVoorberg

I was hooked by page 3 before the narrative even began!
Such a fun read -- amazing vocabulary, inventive writing to get around limitations of permissable letters, light quirky characters. It's not a book one reads for the story itself, which is simple and far-fetched, but for the wit and word play.

It is a logophile's novel.

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LibraryThing member SR510

(Transplanted from my old booklog.)

I had high expectations for this one, having heard its praises sung by several people in the past. Perhaps this is the reason why I found it to be somewhat anticlimactic. It's a fun read; don't get me wrong. For plot-based reasons that you can read in any review,

in each successive chapter of the novel, one or more letters of the alphabet stops being used. An increasing number of circumlocutions are put into use to achieve this, an effect I'm employing here on the sentence level. While this is cute and amusing, and while it is, on the whole, fun to scan, that's about all there is to it. It's progressively lipogrammatic plus epistolary, yes, but re: the last subtitle term, it's rather thin. It is merely a shaggy canine story with a literary veneer. Anyway, go on, peruse it; however, raise not your hopes for meaning. The novel's purpose is thin. Playing with lexemes is all.

I could go on in that mode, with each sentence using only the letters employed in each successive chapter of the book, but I tire of this.

The next paragraph contains massive spoilers, and is ROT-13'd for your protection:

Nf V'ir fnvq nobir, Ryyn Zvaabj Crn vf n funttl-qbt fgbel; gur nhgube pyrneyl fgnegrq jvgu gur raqvat naq jebgr gur erfg bs gur abiry nebhaq vg. Guvf vf jryy naq tbbq, ohg V jvfu ur'q qbar n orggre wbo bs vg. Sbe juvyr gur abiry va trareny vf n fzbbgu ernq, jura ur gevrf gb abapunynagyl fyvc va gur chapuyvar, ur obooyrf vg. V sbhaq zlfrys ernqvat gur xrl fragrapr bire frireny gvzrf, jura V svefg rapbhagrerq vg, jbaqrevat jul vg frrzrq fb bhg bs cynpr. V qvq abg, ng gur gvzr, ernyvmr gung vg jnf n cnatenz, ohg fbzrguvat qrsvavgryl frrzrq bss, vs sbe ab bgure ernfba guna gung gur jbeq "yvdhbe" unq arire orra hfrq orsber jvgu ersrerapr gb gur zvavngher nzcubenr (abe, V guvax, va nal bgure pbaarpgvba), rira va gur gjb puncgref va juvpu gung jbhyq unir orra crezvggrq. Qhaa fubhyq unir rfgnoyvfurq gur hfntr rneyvre; ur qvqa'g; va n obbx nf pbaprearq jvgu jbeqf nf guvf bar -- naq bar va juvpu urnil rzcunfvf vf cynprq ba gur pynvz gung gur fragrapr jnf n anghenyyl-bppheevat nppvqragny bar -- gung qrsvavgryl dhnyvsvrf nf n fperj-hc. Naq rira chggvat nfvqr gur "yvdhbe" znggre, gur fragrapr va dhrfgvba pbhyq unir orra hfrq zber fzbbguyl guna vg jnf. Naq, lrf, bxnl, V'z avgcvpxvat, ohg guvf jnf gur bar cntr nobir nyy bguref gung Qhaa unq gb trg whfg evtug, naq ur oyrj vg gubebhtuyl rabhtu gb guebj zr bhg bs gur abiry sbe n ovg.

But again, on the whole, I did like the book.

(On another note, what was the typesetter of the hardcover edition thinking? A jarringly informal italic typeface is used throughout. This may have been an attempt to convey the feel of handwritten letters, but that effect is shattered by the use of a non-italic sans-serif face for italics. They should have either stuck with their original typeface and used underlined words for italics, or abandoned the whole idea and used a more conventional typeface from the start. [No ""Note on the Type"" is provided, by the way. Perhaps this was an attempt to protect the reputation of the typefaces in question.])

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LibraryThing member goose114

Ella Minnow Pea is about Nollop, the island community that is the home of the creator of the pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” The community has erected a memorial to honor the creator. One day a letter falls off the memorial. The government of the isle is convinced that

this is a sign and bans the use of that letter from any form of communication. Throughout the book letters continue to fall from the memorial and the government continues to ban those letters. As more and more letters are removed from the allowable alphabet, the government says that if someone can think of another pangram that is shorter than the original, the full alphabet will be restored. The story is told through letters written by members of this community who must refrain from using letters that have fallen off the memorial or face harsh punishment. The story illuminates in a playful manner a totalitarian government that is out of control. This was a wonderful book and easy to read with never a dull moment.

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LibraryThing member indygo88

This one's a short, quirky little read, but it's also fun and will give you a new appreciation of the English alphabet.

Imagine letters of our alphabet gradually being outlawed, both in speech & in writing. That's the gist of this story, with the ability to communicate becoming more & more

challenging. With some underlying themes of totalitarianism, it calls the reader to really think about what we take for granted in our language every day. With little bouts of humor, it's an enjoyable, if somewhat unrealistic tale. The most impressive thing about this story is the time it must've taken the author to create such a tale with a gradually diminishing alphabet. Hats off to Mark Dunn!

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LibraryThing member Silvernfire

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book when I started reading it. Sure, it'd gotten a great review in the Christian Science Monitor, which is where I'd first heard of it, but the whole thing sounded gimmicky and contrived. But it was an epistolary novel, which I generally like, so I plunged

in. And yes, it's contrived--it has to be--but it works. And in between the vanishing letters (and the author's cleverness in being able to write with less and less of the alphabet available to him) is a tale of political tyranny and a tribute to freedom of expression: not bad for a novel of only 208 pages.

Oh, and I enjoyed reading something not dumbed down to the lowest common denominator--it's been a while since I've read a novel where I needed to look some words up in the dictionary.

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