Book Mysteries Solved: The Government Was Getting Rid of Letters

"Dystopia about government getting rid of letters"

Seven words from a public WhatIsThatBook search. The last one does nearly all the work. Letters could mean mail. It could mean the alphabet. The search does not say which.

Take the second reading and you get a strong match: Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn.

On the island of Nollop, a monument carries the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Its Z tile falls. The council decides that the fallen letter is a message from Nevin Nollop, the man the monument honors, and bans people from using Z. More tiles fall, and more letters become forbidden.

There is something almost funny about that first decree. Then you think about having to write to someone while pieces of the alphabet keep disappearing. Dunn tells the story through letters between the islanders, so the bans change the messages on the page too.

That is why the alphabet reading seems convincing. A government controlling language might bring 1984 to mind. A government banning individual letters is a much narrower clue, and Dunn's book follows it all the way into the way it is written.

If your own book is stuck in your head as one strange rule or scene, describe what you remember. If it is the government-and-language part you want more of, 1984 takes that idea somewhere else.

We do not know whether the person who wrote the search meant the alphabet, or whether they ever saw the answer. That one ambiguous word is still what made this match possible.