I love the concept of this book: letters of the alphabet are being banned one by one, so the book uses fewer and fewer letters as it progresses, and the people are fighting against this governmental oppression.

For the first half I thought it was fantastic, but I was disappointed by a couple of things later on. First, I expected that as letters were removed the author would continue to use normal spellings, but there came a point when that was given up as too difficult, and the author resorted to using phonetically-similar substitutes. For me, that took a lot of interest out of the book.

Second, a large part of the book revolves around people trying to think of sentences like "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" that use all 26 letters of the alphabet, but are shorter than that one. There would frequently be triumphant claims like "I'm getting closer--I now have a sentence with only 44 letters!", but a closer inspection would reveal that the sentence they supposedly laboured so hard to construct could easily be reduced to a shorter one; for example, it might include a 6-letter adjective containing only one letter that didn't already occur elsewhere in the sentence. A good book should benefit from a closer reading, not suffer from it.

Still, the ending did manage to surprise me, in the best of ways: I felt like I should have seen it coming, but just hadn't been paying close enough attention.

Overall, I would recommend this book: it has an interesting premise, and it's short enough to be worth reading for that alone. The fact that it's an enjoyable read is an added bonus. Although it didn't quite live up to its initial promise, it's still solidly good.