November discussion thread: Ella Minnow Pea

[SusanH]

Here is our discussion thread for November's group read, Ella Minnow Pea. Share your thoughts here!

[SusanH]

I read this yesterday. I was surprised at how quick a read it was - it's relatively few pages and many of them contain a lot of white space, so I breezed through the novel in very little time.

Overall, I enjoyed it. I'm planning to recommend it to a teenager I know who is very political, fond of distopian novels like 1984 and beginning to prepare for exams like the PSAT, SAT, etc. It should be a great vocab booster! There were several words that I still have to go look up. I figured out all definitions from context, but I need to be certain that some are really neologisms and not actual words.

I thought it was a clever concept, well realized. The word play was wonderful and he was wise to keep the novel short. A longer version might have grown tedious, but this didn't. I must confess that I did not pick up on the crucial sentence ahead of time. As I read that sentence, it seemed slightly odd (too repetitive for such a tightly-written novel), but I didn't pause long enough to really look at it. I was in too much of a hurry to see what would happen next.

All in all, a fun read.

[Lisa Jo]

Spoilers ahead! Proceed at your own risk!







This was so much fun! Very clever, and like you said Susan, played out just right. The concept would have become tedious in a longer book. When the first three letters dropped it seemed easy enough to avoid their use. But when D fell - I mentally gasped. How to live without D? Yet they did. I found myself wondering how the author wrote each successive passage as the letters kept dropping out. Did he just write what came to mind, then go back and rewrite/rephrase the passages with banned letters? That would almost have to be it - I can't imagine how slow it would be to create text as you go, with so many letters missing. Then again, perhaps he did do it that way, to simulate how Nollop residents would have done it. I love how this book made me think about language is such an intriguing way. Even the title - and how Ella's name was formed from the 5 remaining letters - made me smile.

Like you, I still have to go back and look up words. I also missed the key sentence, which kind of annoyed me. It would have given me such a satisfying smug feeling to have caught it.

What a great little book!

[Maribeth]

I finished this about 3 weeks ago and I keep forgetting to post here! This was such a fun read and another book I probably wouldn't have picked up if it hadn't been for the Reading Circle. Thanks for picking it!

I confess that I did spot the infamous line and spent awhile writing it out to count the letters. It just felt so weird and something jumped out at me. BUT, I think I may have seen it when I first picked up the book and thumbed through it quickly. There's that page where Ella figures it out and the page is nothing but that line several times. When I got to that page, I was sorta disappointed in myself. A bit of an aha - you did see this before type of thing even though I hadn't read actually read the page. I have to be honest that it could have been something more than my quick wit picking up on it!

Did anyone feel a bit haunted underneath it all by how a government can just take over and do such awful things? I read this a week or so after the election and maybe that's why government type thoughts were in my head.

Overall, a very fun read. I bought the book and I think I'll keep it rather than sell or pass on. Definitely something I would enjoy again (and again).

Mari

[Lisa Jo]

Did anyone feel a bit haunted underneath it all by how a government can just take over and do such awful things? I read this a week or so after the election and maybe that's why government type thoughts were in my head.

Absolutely! It seemed like such a "cute" little story on the surface but there was quite a dark current underneath. Punishing the use of banned letters by flogging or death!