Speaking of interesting use of language (as I was in my last post), who out there has read Ella Minnow Pea? It's Mark Dunn's debut novel, which came out in 2001. You'll probably find this shelved with literary fiction rather than in YA, though the protagonist is obviously a teenager.

Ella lives on a fictional island where the people revere Nevin Nollop, the man who penned the famous sentence that uses all the letters of the alphabet, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." There's even a statue of Nevin. But when letters start falling off the statue, the island's council bans the use of those letters of the alphabet. The whole thing is written as a series of letters, and the islandfolk have to become more creative in use of word choice as each letter disappears.

At the TLA conference a couple of years ago, I sat in on a session where Nancy Pearl was discussing this book with a bunch of librarians. Somebody said they saw Ella Minnow Pea as a farce. Even though the premise is outrageous, and some of the events are funny, I don't agree. Unless you think of Orwell's Animal Farm as a farce. There's something dark and dangerous in the power the island council wields. They're threatening death, banishment or imprisonment for disobediance as early as the first letter Ella sends to her cousin. And there's nothing funny about the courage it takes in the face of that for Ella to stand up for what is right.