Hailed by the Christian Science Monitor as “the first political satire of the 21st century”—and by the Dallas Morning News as “Orwell meets Scrabble”—Ella Minnow Pea is an exuberant novel of language and ideas that should be of particular interest to high school and college students. As a political satire, it reflects the paranoid absurdities of both the political correctness movement and the domestic war on terror. But the book is also a dazzling linguistic performance that will appeal to anyone who enjoys the subtleties and suppleness of the English language. The 19th-century violinist Niccolo Paganini was famous for snipping three strings of his instrument in mid-concerto and playing on without missing a beat. In Ella Minnow Pea Mark Dunn goes Paganini 21 better, divesting himself of most of the letters of the English alphabet and doing so in perfect accordance with the dictates of his story.
Ella Minnow Pea lives on the fictional island of Nollop, located of the coast of South Carolina. The island is named after a man named Nevin Nollop, who is credited with the pangram, “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” The citizens of Nollop pride themselves on their extensive vocabulary and their creative use of language.
The story is told through a series of letters to and from different citizens on the island, beginning in July and ending just a few months later in November. When the novel begins, Ella (who lives in the busy town of Nollopton) writes to her cousin Tassie (who lives in the more rural village of Nollopville) explaining that something odd has happened. There is a statue commemorating Nollop in the center of Nollopton, with each letter of the pangram inscribed on a tile at its base. One day, the tile bearing the letter “Z” falls from the statue. The island’s governing body, the High Island Council, determines that this is a sign from Nollop beyond the grave that citizens should no longer use the letter “Z” in speech or writing. They decree that the first offense will result in an oral reprimand, the second will incur a choice of flogging or headstock, and the third will result in banishment from the island. Ella decides to cautiously obey the decrees for the time being, but Tassie is outraged in Ella’s response, pointing out that already books are being banned from the library. Ella recognizes the problem with not being able to use the letter “Z”: they cannot accurately write about this incident in the history books without using the letter.
<span>A small room that is connected to a larger room and used as a place for people to wait before going into the larger room, therefore the answer is A. A waiting room.</span>
