The basic premise of this book is that the people on a small island off the coast of South Carolina "worship" Nevin Nollop, the author of the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." They have a statue in town that displays the sentence, a letter per tile. What happens is that the tiles start to fall down and as the letters fall, the government prohibits their use. The people on the island are no longer able to write, read, or speak the fallen letters, if they do, they are severely punished and made an example of in town. The story's main character is a young woman named Ella Minnow Pea, who, along with her family and friends, is trying to come up with a way to make the government see that they are being irrational and that they should reinstate the fallen letters.
Things I liked:
1. It is an epistolary novel (which means it is written solely in letters).
2. I learned so many new words, including the word epistolary, haha! I got to use my brain to figure out what some of the words meant. I love his use of unusual words. A couple of my favorite words were piscivorous: which means feeding on fish (I figured this one out by dissecting the word, which I did often with other words while reading this novel) and aposiopesis which means suddenly breaking off when you are speaking (I just looked this one up because I didn't think my brain could even handle trying to figure that word out).
3. I don't want to spoil anything so I won't post details, but the ending was so good. The book was kind of boring, to be honest, but the ending was so cool. I got chills when I read it, and laughed out loud.
Things I didn't like:
1. This book was not as exciting as I wanted it to be. The story was a little blah for me, I wanted to be invested in the characters more, but maybe the fact that it was written all in letters deterred me from being able to really get to know the characters, that and the fact that I didn't know anything about their lives prior to the letters falling, so I wasn't invested in the characters.
2. Towards the end when they had lost most of the alphabet, the characters wrote phonetically. I am fine with having to figure out some words phonetically, but I became a secondary teacher for a reason. When I was reading the correspondences in which the words were spelled out phonetically I just thought about my roommate from student teaching who taught first grade and how she constantly had to read phonetically to understand what her students were writing. In this novel, at first I kind of chuckled because I was having to read this way, but then it just became annoying.
Just an observation:
Very odd concept that the man, Nevin Nollop, who composed the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" is the higher being for the people on this island. They literally say that he is omniscient and omnipresent and that "his will be done." To me it seems ridiculous becauseof my own religious beliefs, but in this fictional land, they believe an author is a deity. Interesting.
As an English teacher, I love words and have studied language in depth, so I had an easier time than other people might reading this book. If you are not a fan of big words or dictionaries, I don't recommend this book to you. But if you find words loveable, give it a try!
