Ratings

Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content

Guide to Rating System

LANGUAGE

VIOLENCE

SEXUAL CONTENT

ADULT THEMES

Ratings Explanation

Violence:  People who violate the new speech laws (using any of the banned letters when speaking) are publicly flogged, whipped, or lashed; some choose the headstock in the public square in lieu of lashings.  A man is killed when he is shot in the head for trying to escape capture.

Sexual Content:  Tassie and Nate share a “long” kiss.

Adult Themes:  People drink wine. A young woman sends death threats to members of the town council in outrage against the new speech laws. A woman dies of lead poisoning after painting her entire naked body in an effort to express herself.

Synopsis

On the fictional island of Nollop lives a bright, spirited, young woman named Ella Minnow Pea. Her island, located just off the South Carolina coast, is named for Nevin Nollop, creator of the pangram* The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. In Nollopton town square there stands a statue dedicated to his memory, with the sentence that made him famous mounted on the statue’s base. But when the letters mysteriously begin to fall from the cenotaph, the members of Nollop’s High Island Council interpret it as revelation:  surely it is “the Almighty Nollop’s” way of speaking to them from the grave, they whisper, and his wishes must be to prohibit the fallen letters from the alphabet and their speech. First goes the letter ‘z’, then ‘q’–both letters that most islanders feel they can live without. But soon gone are ‘j’, ‘l’, ‘d’, ‘k’, ‘f’, and so on, then a vowel (!), until soon the spoken word becomes nearly impossible. People are being banished from the island in droves for their linguistic violations, and suddenly Ella realizes she must act to save her beloved Nollop from the totalitarianism of the High Island Council. As the letters fall from the statue, they also disappear from the book, making for creative spelling and a humorous, imaginative read.

*pangram: a sentence or phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet.

Not only did I thoroughly enjoy this book, I needed a dictionary beside me to keep up with the narrative. The book is composed of letters written to or by Ella and her cousin, her parents, and her neighbors, all of whom possess enormous vocabularies and make witty observations. By book’s end I had written my own glossary on the back page. A fellow reader commented that it’s as if the characters had swallowed a thesaurus and were regurgitating the words on page, but you soon come to see that it is their love of language that makes the Nollopians’ predicament all the more painful as each fallen letter becomes forbidden. One woman writes to her sister, “Robbed of two letters, I now chooooose to overuuuse the twenty-four which remaaaain.” On the eve of ‘q’s exile from the alphabet, a woman says to her husband, “Today we queried, questioned, and inquired. Promise me that come tomorrow, we will not stop asking why.” A great commentary on issues such as censorship, freedom of speech, and totalitarianism. I close with my own pangram: Lovers of lexicon will embrace this fun, quirky novel and jet through its pages with zeal!