I’ve had this book on my shelf for some two years, but hesitated reading it because well, from some reviews it just sounded too gimicky. It was- and it wasn’t. Very clever the wordplay, plenty of charm and humor throughout and yet how sobering the underlying message. The premise starts out with something rather ridiculous- there’s a small self-governing island where everybody loves language and letter-writing. It was founded by the man who created the famous pangram (a sentence using all the letters of the alphabet) the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. He’s so revered there’s a statue to him with the sentence below in tiles. One day a tile falls off: the letter Z.
Ella Minnow Pea has been reviewed all over the book blogs. Below is just a sampling:
7 Responses
What a strange plot that is. Can't say I've ever run into anything remotely like it, so I'll see if my library has it…but they probably won't because libraries seem to have a pretty high turnover rate these days unless the book is by some famous author or became a bestseller when published. Well, we'll see.
Well, I'm shocked…my library system DID have it, and I've even found that five other people are ahead of me waiting on it. Nice surprise.
It was pretty popular when it first came out- I felt like I was the only one who hadn't read it yet! Will look for your take on it- the wordplay is fun and the degradation of people's lives alarming, if you can just get past the rather ludicrous premise.
I really love this book! There's something about it that just makes me smile every time I read it. 🙂
Interesting! I'm not sure it would work for me, I don't like unusual spellings or things written phonetically (I have dyslexia, my brain can't wrap around phonic spelling). But the plot sounds good though!–Thistle
It was pretty fun, wasn't it?
The beginning you might enjoy- as it was mostly wordplay with lots of unusual words- but the ending was a bit of a struggle. I had to focus a lot on the last handful of chapters, but I did like it still. I found it quite unique and it had a lot of messages undercurrent about government control and how much people were able to justify and/or follow the ridiculous edicts.