Review Detail

Ella Minnow Pea is a 18 year old young lady who lives on the fabled Nollopton with her mother and father and this story is told through letters that the people of Nollopton write to eachother.  Ella's main person she writes to is her cousin Tassie.  Many years ago a man named Mr Nevin Nollop created the pangram "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."  It contains all of the letters of the alphabet at least once and is short.  So the town made Mr. Nollop and erected a monument of him with the sentence below him on the monument.  When the Z letter falls off, the councilpeople who run Nollop have an emergency meeting and decide (crazy!) that Mr. Nollop is speaking to them from beyond and telling them to rid the use of the letter Z.  Many are stunned, but not very concerned.  However, they then put sanctions on anyone who uses the letter z - first offense is a public embarrassment, second is a flogging or head in an old wooden contraption and third offense is banishment.  They also take all of the books containing the letter and destroy them.  People try to change their ways but it is hard.  When a second letter falls, then a third, fourth, fifth, etc it becomes more difficult for them to write eachother letters.  The more letters that fall, the more creative they have to learn to be.  The councilpeople then become power hungry and start doing things which in normal times would be illegal and using Mr. Nollop as their reason.  It's a cute story, with lots of different elements.  Also, the use of Ella Minnow Pea is great - as in l - m - n - o - p.  It gets a bit harder to read at the end but this book is a lot of fun.