REVIEW: ‘Elle Minnow Pea’ is short read but worth it
Written in the most innovative novel format I’ve seen since reading “House of Leaves” five years ago, “Ella Minnow Pea” is meant for adults and youth alike. Author Mark Dunn writes in a progressively minimalistic style throughout the novel, but it isn’t just a writing style, it’s the integral component of the plot.
Eighteen-year old Ella Minnow Pea lives on an Island called Nollop, named for the inventor of the famous sentence: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. I’m sure we all typed it hundreds of types in grade-school computer classes, as it uses all 26 letters of the alphabet.
The small island community is governed by a council, but doesn’t need much by the way of governance- the town was formed in celebration of the spoken word, and their primary tenets are using proper grammar and extensive vocabularies.
However, the statue immortalizing the sentence the townspeople so adore loses a letter one day, and the council takes the mishap as a sign from the late Nevin Nollop that this letter should no longer be used. Ever.
As letters continue to fall inexplicably to the pavement of the town square, so does each letter disappear from the text making up the book itself. Luckily for readers, there is more than one “e” in the sentence, but unfortunately for the townspeople, the council imposes harsh, strictly enforced punishments on those who use a word containing a banned letter.
This includes written and spoken communication, and Dunn holds nothing back in making his point about totalitarian rule and the seemingly arbitrary restrictions upon which these regimes often rally.
Neighbors turn on each other, families are broken apart, and individuals fall prey to old vices in desperate circumstances as Ella Minnow Pea and a select few others try to find a way to get their language back and persuade the council that an omniscient Nevin Nollop is not the cause of the decimated statue.
Dunn magically disguises a social and political commentary into a subtle sub-layer of the text, making the book a delightfully, fast-paced and clever adventure for any reader to breeze through. The roughly 200 pages can also be a thoughtful, exciting tale for a more careful reader, so even if you’re just a little bit curious about the novelty of this kind of book, I’d recommend picking it up. It’s a great choice for a book group, as well, offering plenty to laugh about, decipher and discuss.
–chelsey.gensel@aggiemail.usu.edu