Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

This tongue-in-cheek tale in epistolary style takes place on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. The hero of this island community is Nevin Nollop, the creator of the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" and it is this sentence that adorns the statue in his honor. Their isolation and dedication to Nollop's love of language have kept the inhabitants a few many decades behind the rest of the world with no plans to change. That is until the tile letter "z" falls off the statue. The leaders of the community believe that this is a sign from Nollop himself and it becomes a crime to use any word which contains the missing letter. There are further challenges as letters continue to fall and are banned from the very book you are reading. Language will be lost entirely UNLESS someone can come up with another sentence using thirty-two letters or less that uses all the letters of the alphabet. There is a certain absurdist metaphor about how fools come to power to be enjoyed but the better lark is seeing if you can you spot the winning sentence before it is reveled.