I wholeheartedly recommend this ludicrously hilarious example of linguistic creativity.

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When I first tried this book, I put it down after a chapter or two because it wasn’t holding my interest right away. But I came back to it a month or so later and am SO glad I did.

Although it starts out slow, Mark Dunn’s bizarrely brilliant novella quickly picks up and becomes a wild ride through a progressive butchery of the English language. It’s funny and clever, using language in a playfully absurd way, and I cheered out loud at the payoff at the end.

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Yes, that’s an actual excerpt from the text at a particularly dire point in the story. Set on a fictional island nation of those who revere the creator of “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” the story is told through increasingly desperate and ridiculous letters between family and neighbors as the government outlaws more and more of the alphabet when letters begin to fall from a plaque in town square.

Dunn’s use of increasingly preposterous synonyms and made-up homonyms is amazingly fun. I laughed so hard when they renamed the days of the week after losing the letter D (Satto-gatto nearly made me choke on my drink), and absolutely lost it when people stopped bothering with the names of the months at all and just wrote whatever substitutes came to mind each day.

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I will say this is probably not a book for casual readers unless you’re aiming to dramatically expand your vocabulary. This is more for people who really enjoy language. The early chapters are silly and light but extremely verbose as part of the country’s amusing culture, and then as more and more essential letters are banned, the later chapters become a mad mess of misspellings and half-assed homophones. If you’re looking for serious or deep commentary, this is not the book for you either. It’s just fun and silly and crazy, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.