"Ella Minnow Pea" by Mark Dunn

Back in the early 2000s, when I was in my scrapbooking phase, I frequented a wildly popular website/business, owned by a husband-wife team, called Two Peas in a Bucket (defunct since 2014). It was the name of an online store where you could buy scrapbooking supplies and take online classes -- but attached to the retail site was an online community where scrapbookers could share their layouts, ask questions of each other, share tips and techniques and, in the "NSBR" forum ( = Non-ScrapBooking Related), chat about other things. There were some clever usernames, often incorporating the word "Pea" in some way. One user's name that stuck out in my mind was Ella Minnow Pea, which I thought was a rather clever bit of wordplay. 

Perhaps not quite so clever!  What I didn't realize, until many years later, was that "Ella Minnow Pea" is also the name of a book by Mark Dunn, published in 2001.  It's the December selection for my Childless Collective Nomo Book Club (chosen because it's a short book -- under 200 pages -- for a very busy month).  

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I started reading this book. I knew that it was an "epistolary" novel, i.e., the story is told through the exchange of letters.  And for some reason, I was under the impression that it was a humorous novel. 

There IS humour in "Ella Minnow Pea" -- but it would probably be safer to call it a satire. The underlying message it conveys is deadly serious -- perhaps even more so today than when it was first written.   

Our title character, Ella Minnow Pea, 18 years old, lives on the (fictional) island of Nollop, off the coast of South Carolina, where a lack of modern technologies means that residents (including Ella, her parents, her aunt and her cousin Tassie) communicate by letter instead of phone calls or email. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, the (fictional) author of the "immortal pangram" (which IS real and known to anyone who ever took a typing class):  "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." (Pangram = a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet.)  Nollop is a revered figure on the island:  there's a cenotaph in his memory in the centre of the main town of Nollopton, including a statue and the "immortal pangram" inscribed upon it with tile letters. 

One day, the tile with the letter Z drops off the monument. The statue has been in place for more than 100 years;  the logical explanation is that the glue fixing the tiles to the statue's base is loosening. The town council, however, interprets this as a divine sign from the revered Nollop that the letter Z must be excised from the community's vocabulary.  Henceforth, those speaking, writing or reading words containing the letter Z will be swiftly punished -- time in the stocks or a public flogging (!), with multiple transgressions punished by exile or, ultimately, execution. (!!) 

One by one, other letters start dropping off the monument. And, as they disappear from Nollop's vocabulary, they also disappear from the book. 

This book is a word-lovers dream, with an amazing vocabulary. (One description I read called it "a linguistic tour de force.") The residents' contorted efforts to communicate with a rapidly shrinking choice of approved letters and words is funny and clever -- but also horrifying. As the letters disappear, the rights and freedoms of the island's people quickly become more and more restricted, and the governing council becomes more and more totalitarian/dictatorial. Citizens inform on each other and make/receive anonymous death threats, mail is opened and inspected, homes are raided and expropriated, freedom of worship -- aside from the worship of Nollop -- is curtailed. Many flee the island, smuggling letters back & forth to their loved ones who remain.  

The ardent devotion to Nollop may seem ridiculous and cultish -- and probably seemed REALLY ridiculous when this book was written in 2001. 

These days, maybe not quite so much... 

There's a lot to think about here. 

((Very) Mild spoiler alert:  If what I've written has you thinking you'll take a pass on this book, I'll just say that the ending is fairly upbeat.)  

4 stars on Goodreads. 

This was Book #43 read to date in 2023 (and Book #3 finished in November), bringing me to 96% of my 2023 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 3 books ahead of schedule. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2023 tagged as "2023 books."