If I had a category called "quirky" I would file Ella Minnow Pea there! This is an epistolary novel... told as a series of letters. You have to give it a second because there is no narrator explaining who is who. You just jump right in! Ella Minnow Pea (say it fast... did you catch the significance?) is a young girl that lives in a village that has a town hero. He is the guy that "invented" the phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."
Wikipedia says: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is an English-language pangram—a sentence that contains all of the letters of the alphabet. It is commonly used for touch-typing practice, testing typewriters and computer keyboards, displaying examples of fonts, and other applications involving text where the use of all letters in the alphabet is desired. Owing to its brevity and coherence, it has become widely known.
The statue in the town square with this super important phrase is getting older and the letters begin to fall off. The town fathers decree that this must mean that the fallen letters can no longer be used in any communication. People who use fallen letters (and more and more fall) are subject to banishment. Here is the charming aspect of the novel: as letters become forbidden, they also disappear from the novel! The author continues to tell the sotry, but without certain letters. Super clever, right?
While the novel reads like an Anne of Green Gables throw back, it truly is a dystopian commentary on government gone bad. It's a quick read and it really made me think.
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