Ella Minnow Pea

A true love letter to the alphabet and the things we can do with it - and without it.

Ella Minnow Pea lives on the island Nollop with her family. The island is named after Nevis Nollop, inventor of the phrase “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”, which is permanently placed on a plaque at the town memorial. But then one day letters start falling off the memorial and instead of putting them back, the Council sees it as a message from Nollop himself: those same letters shall become forbidden.

The amazing thing about this book is that Dunn eases using the letters as they illegal on Nollop. This results in hilarious rewrites of common phrases that had me thinking quite a lot about where the limit is for comprehension. The book is extraordinary and linguistically a very impressive read.