Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
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
For the Reading Challenge(s):
2026 52 Book Club Reading Challenge (Prompt #3: Written without quotation marks)
The Reason
I’d been wanting to read this for a while but never got around to it. I saw that it fit one of the prompts for the 52 Book Club Reading Challenge, so I decided to finally read it.
The Quotes
“Today we queried, questioned, and inquired. Promise me that come tomorrow, we will not stop asking why.”
“The Council is wrong. Yet, observe that none of us will risk telling it so, for fear of the consequences.”
“Any one of us could have come up with such a sentence. We are, when it comes right down to it, all of us: mere monkeys at typewriters.”
My Thoughts
This book surprised me; I thought it was middle-grade, and it sort of is suitable for younger readers, but it was deeper and darker than I expected. I thought it was going to be a fun and light-hearted take on the idea of letters falling off the alphabet and only being able to use the letters that were left, but it turned out to be quite a serious exploration on the absurdity of going along with ridiculous ideas because people are too afraid to fight back. The result of losing your “voice”, losing the ability to communicate clearly, because of those missing letters, is such a strong metaphor for being censored and silenced by the powers that be. It’s very well-written and such a powerful story, especially for impressionable young readers, and I wish I had read this book a long time ago!
My Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.
Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?
