Finished Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. This was delightful. I ripped through this one, and will have to read it again more slowly to savor the details (and spend more time looking up words, rather than guessing meaning from context and moving right on.)
I like the epistolary format, though I felt that the two girls (Ella and Tassie) were a little hard to distinguish just from the text. That may have something to do with the speed at which I read the book, though.
It's about the fictional island of Nollop, named for the man who invented the phrase, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." There's a statue to him on the island, with that phrase mounted in tiles. The tiles start falling off due to faulty cement, and the power-hungry council decrees that it's a sign from Nollop that those letters must no longer be used.
The wordplay in the book is delightful. And though I spotted the key to the ending when it first appeared, that didn't lessen my enjoyment one bit. The book makes you want to gobble a thesaurus and improve your vocabulary.
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