Good book. Somewhere along the lines of Fahrenheit 451, only approached from a different angle. Ella Minnow Pea is set on a small utopian-type island named for one Nevin Nollop, that linguistic genius who first penned the phrase “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Nollop’s memory is immortalized in both the love and prowess the island’s inhabitants have for language and a statue erected in the town square in his honor featuring the famous phrase. All is well in life on the island until suddenly the letters on the statue begin to fall from the phrase, moving the island’s governing council to declare the falling letters to be communication from beyond the grave from their beloved linguistic ancestor and begin barring the usage of the fallen letters.

I liked the epistolary form Dunn takes for this novel. The letters are written by various island inhabitants, most from the story’s heroine, a young girl for whom the book is named. As letters drop from Nollop’s statue and are subsequently banned from use on the island of Nollop, they disappear from the letters comprising the book as well.

Ella, like Fahrenheit 451 and other dystopian novels, has myriad subtle messages about the dangers of totalitarianism and allowing one’s rights to be taken without a struggle; the book is, however, more lighthearted and not quite so dark as other dystopias.

A quick, enjoyable read. It is, as Ella describes itself, “a quirky novel with pages of zany, jumbled lexicon.”