Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters Paperback - Mark Dunn ------------ 3 Stars

Clever, creative, original - just same words that come to mind after finishing the bizarre but somehow quite interesting, Ella Minnow Pea. Released in 2022, I had read the premise of the book and thought it seemed like something I had not seen before; happy I gave it a try.

As noted above, the book is about (per Amazon), "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 phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet, “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 "a love letter to alphabetarians and logomaniacs everywhere" (Myla Goldberg, bestselling author of Bee Season)"

Not sure about you, but the line, "as the letters progressively drop form the statue they also disappear form the novel." This, I thought is interesting; is the author really going to stop using certain letters in his prose (yes!)? Is it going to be weird and hard to read (again, yes!). Is it not something I've seen before (of course, yes!). 

It's a weird book but pretty interesting and I think satire(!?). One huge plus, it's super short (Amazon says 208 pages but it took me like 2 hours to finish). Like a long short story or maybe "novella" length. This helps as it's all letters between people, and as I noted, reading a book without certain letters is hard to do! The book has got some funny parts too and has a pretty great ending. 

Other downsides between the hard reading at the end- a bit hard to follow all the characters. As there are letters you don't know who is writing till then end (or you flip a few pages forward).  Even then, it's hard to always keep straight. The bigger issue is that there were NUMEROUS words on each page I had no idea what they mean. I feel pretty knowledgeable of words but, wow, it was tough. I used context clues for most (too lazy for dictionary) but it seemed like author was just showing off at some points.

Anyway, check it out. Again, different but worth the read at least once.