Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn

Thursday, September 20, 2007



ISBN: 978-0385722438

I read this in under 12 hours, including sleeping a night-full in there. It is very short (only 200 pages) but it is also so incredibly excellent that I woke up early to finish it (then went back to bed). This book is written in the form of letters, whose vocabulary and word usage gets more and more constricted as letters fall of the statue devoted to Nollop (the guy who wrote: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog) and they get axed from the island's vocabulary. The penalty for using these letters is eventually death. This book is hilarious and still scary, a literary 1984 if you will.

5/5

2 comments:

Tim J said...

I think this book is absolutely brilliant. Hilarious and scary is exactly right - my favourite sentence is probably "She shoot loog smashing 4 the phooneral" (p.179)

I found your review as a result of looking at a Google search which led someone to mine! It's on my opera.com blog at http://is.gd/1R54 if you're interested. Feel free to leave a comment if you visit :-)

Tim J said...

Back again to let you know I've added a link from my review to yours, with a comment encouraging people to come and see your book reviews.