Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn

Ella Minnow Pea has one of the best subtitles I think I’ve ever come across: ‘A novel without letters’. It’s ironic, clever, amusing, the truth and a lie all in one go. This is a book in which certain letters from the alphabet gradually become outlawed – ultimately leaving just five (four consonants and a single vowel) for the author and characters to work with – yet is a story told purely though the medium of letters and notes, making it simultaneously a novel without letters and a novel full of them!

Ella Minnow Pea is a teenaged girl who lives with her parents on a small, independently governed island just off the coast of the United States. The island – Nollop – takes it’s name from a now deceased citizen of its nation, Nevin Nollop, who famously (or perhaps not so famously) created the sentence, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” This pangram, a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet, is held by the islanders in highest elevation, representative, they believe, of a greatness of language to which all of its citizens should aspire.

Eschewing modern technology as far as possible, letter writing appears to be the dominant form of communication on Nollop, and so the story begins with Ella writing to her cousin Tassie, who lives in a village in a far corner of the island. There is a great deal of hubbub in the capital of Nollopton, we learn, where an alphabetical tile has fallen from the classic sentence that adorns Nevin Nollop’s statue in the town centre: the letter Z, to be exact. While most people begin by assuming it is simply an act of nature precipitated by weakened glue on said tile, the High Council soon pronounces that there is a much higher purpose to be gleaned from the event: namely, that the tumbling of the letter Z is “a terrestrial manifestation of Mr. Nollop’s wishes.” And Mr. Nollop’s wishes are? That ‘Z’ be expunged from the alphabet forever more.

As of midnight on August 7th, no citizen is allowed to speak, write, or be in possession of the letter Z. At the outset, Ella isn’t terribly concerned by the pronouncement: Z, after all, is a fairly little-used letter. The outlaw of its use shouldn’t provide too great a challenge, and the challenge that it does represent is one that she is happy and eager to embrace. But Tassie sees things differently… And when August 8th comes around and Z is no more, it becomes startlingly clear how widespread an effect the removal of even this small alphabetical letter can have.

Mark Dunn is a supreme master of the English language, and as Ella Minnow Pea (or L-M-N-O-P) unfolds it soon becomes clear what a fascinating construct it is. As missives go back and forth, between Ella and Tassie initially, and then between other characters as they are gradually brought in to the story, adding new shades of light and dark, we are quietly led to realize that, despite it’s hearty subtitle, there is much more to this tale that just letters. First, a rather strict series of punishments is put into place by the High Council for any alphabetical transgressors and then, as more letters begin to fall, utopia rapidly descends into classic dystopian territory, all notion of human rights and morality deserting the island leaders as their obsession with Nollop takes over.

Can Ella and her fellows find a way to stop the madness before it is too late?

The characters, the politics and their relationships are all wonderfully and intriguingly developed, but it is the structure of this novel that’s left the greatest mark on my thoughts. What result does losing just one or two letters have? Books, names, and foods are all lost, while neighbor turns upon neighbor, the close-knit community quickly imploding. The Nollopian desire to elevate language is met, though, in a sense, as the characters strive to talk around the words they would otherwise say or bring into employ less common usage words for the same meaning.

As letters fall in ever greater numbers, though, language starts to falter. First things are renamed (with the loss of D, for instance, days of the week become Sunshine, Monty, Toes, Wetty, Thurby, Fribs, and Satto-gatto). Then, instead of the flowery and well-considered manner of speaking and writing from before, sentences become stark and grammarless. Spellings are changed to make words that sound the same but which avoid the illegal lettering and ultimately, language loses all essential meaning, becoming a base form, impossible to write or speak, while most of the community is torn asunder and spread to the four winds.

The only way out is if they can find a new sentence that supersedes Nollop’s 35 piece sentence: a pangram of 32 letters or less. Then, the Council, promises, they will accept that Nollop is not, perhaps, the be-all and end-all of language that they currently believe. But is it possible? Can Ella find the magic sentence before the deadline the Council has set? Is there even a sentence to find?

By turns funny and disturbing, tender and thought-provoking, Ella Minnow Pea is wonderful and brilliant, letter-less and letter-full and which takes language to a whole new level.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Bernadette Fox has gone missing. This much we know. What we don’t know is how or why - but her daughter, Bee, is determined to find out.

Told through a combination of letters, emails, notes, and reports, and tied together by Bee’s personal account of the events transcribed within them, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is immensely enjoyable, fun and funny. I swung from sympathy to outrage to sorrow to laughter and roundabout and back again during my reading. It’s extremely well written and so cleverly plotted that I failed to predict a single outcome (at least, not until it was so obvious that the characters themselves had figured it out). It’s nice to see where a story is going sometimes, but it’s also so fun and refreshing to be kept guessing right up until the end. Maria Semple twists her characters around from bad to good, and good to bad, and twists her readers and their emotions right around her little finger along with them. It is just awesomely done.

So, to Bernadette. She’s a complicated figure: a mystery to her husband, best friend to her daughter, enemy, it seems, to everyone else. And to the reader? Lonely and reclusive. She has an infernal dislike for the other mothers at Bee’s school (or ‘gnats’, as she refers to them), one of whom is unfortunately a neighbor. Right from the get-go, we can see exactly what sort of person this neighbor is: selfish, self-righteous and self-absorbed. It's no wonder Bernadette calls her and her cohorts the gnats, and the go-between letters between the gnats and Bernadette’s response to the subsequent events are hilarious. Semple sets everything up just perfectly.

Every character gets a look-in in this book, Bernadette, Bee, the gnats, her eccentric husband Elgin with his penchant for chronically misinterpreting everything (although, I guess, to give him his due, it’s fairly understandable why he gets to the conclusions he gets to), just as they all, except for Bee, have a part to play in the outcome. Each has their individual blindnesses that contributes in its own way to Bernadette’s disappearance, Bernadette included – you know as soon as she starts giving out her bank details to her 'online assistant' Manjula that tears are going to be shed. But they each make up for it in the end, except perhaps for one particularly nasty gnat who just can’t break her evil ways, try as she might.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a book that defies classification – I wouldn’t want to risk anyone missing out on it’s heart and wit by giving it any form of label. Heart is perhaps the best way of describing it, though: the heart that comes from this collection of characters, their weaknesses and their strengths. During the first part of the story, I found myself asking not, Where Did Bernadette Go? but, What Happened Bernadette? What happened to make you the person you are today? Although, thinking about it, perhaps Semple’s title is asking the same thing. Because maybe the title's question refers not just to Bernadette’s present disappearance, but also to the more metaphorical one, where she disappeared into herself after The Horrible Thing that happened of twenty-ish years ago. Can Bee and Elgin get her back?

Ketchup Clouds, by Annabel Pitcher

Ketchup Clouds is absolutely compulsive reading. An epistolary novel, this is Zoe’s story told through a series of letters that she writes to a prisoner on death row. Why him? Well, she figures they’ve got a bit in common: they have both committed murder. Except Zoe has gotten away with it while Stuart Harris hasn’t. Zoe needs to confide in someone and this stranger is the only person she feels she can talk to, and quietly, bit by bit, she reveals the details of her secret.

A love story and a story of secrets, Annabel Pitcher has worked into her book many different layers, family tensions, and miscommunications, culminating in both the tragedy that Zoe cannot escape from and the beginnings of release from secrets held too close. It takes a real quality of writing to so successfully create the perfect balance between emotional catharsis and the story’s revelations that Pitcher achieves here. Her place on the shortlist of the Waterstones 2013 Children’s Book Prize is well deserved. In fact, personally, I’d say she’s in with a strong chance of winning.

At the beginning of her story, Zoe meets two boys: Max and Aaron. She begins two different kinds of relationships with them, which gradually descends into confusion as the lies and secrets begin to take hold - she knows what, or who, she really wants, but trying to get it right is a lot harder than perhaps it should be. As the different deceptions build up into the leaning tower of Pisa, Zoe very efficiently keeps us guessing as to which of the two boys is ultimately going to be the victim of her ‘crime’. Meanwhile, there are troubles at home. Zoe has two little sisters - Dot, the apple of their mother’s eye, and Sophie who is increasingly left out of the fold. Add to this the fact that their father has just been made redundant, and that there is some mysterious rift between the family and their grandfather. Why does Zoe’s mum refuse to get a job? Why does she refuse to let the children visit their sick grandfather? And why is she so obsessed about finding a ‘cure’ for Dot’s disability? Everyone in this family has something to hide.

Pitcher’s characters are lifelike, rounded and realistic. Zoe is a student of average capability and average popularity but is as equally unable to resist as I would be when the popular boy in school seeks her out, and she dabbles in teenage experimentation without taking it beyond the realm of no return, making this a well-balanced story for the average teenager (15+?).

The lead-in, “I know what it’s like... Mine was a boy. And I killed him. Three months ago exactly... No one has a clue and I’m walking around like that boy, Scot Free, saying all the right things and doing all the right stuff, but inside I’m sort of screaming,” is highly compelling and Zoe’s writing style is simple and easy to read, drawing you deeper and deeper into her story. My only slight irritation was the way in which, although neither parents were working, they seemed to have zero monetary concerns - if I remember correctly, the father drives a BMW for goodness' sake - in the real world in this situation, belts would be being tightened and arguing over who gets to look for a job wouldn't really be a consideration.

Ketchup Clouds subtly reminds us that one lie easily leads to another, and secrets can be dark and dreadful things, eating away inside you. An excellently woven story, and one that I can see myself reading a second time.