Vacation will do that to you.

The first book: Ella Minnow Pea (say it out loud…) by Mark Dunn. It was almost too clever for its own good. Still, I liked it. The basic plot: Ella lives with her family on the fictional island of Nollop, where they revere Nevin Nollop, the guy who penned “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.” There’s a statue of Nevin, with the sentence, and when letters begin falling off the statue, the High Council of the island decide that it’s a sign from Nollop (whom they end up worshipping in the end) to stop using those letters. The book is written in letter form, and as the letters fall from the statue, they stop appearing in the book. By the end, it’s pretty amusing. (although difficult to read, especially after the High Council decides that phonetic spellings could be used for written correspondence. I ended up reading pages aloud so I could figure them out.)

The second book: Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. I was less impressed with this one. Fun, but kind of limited in it’s excitement. It was missing… something. Don’t know what. I liked that it was an origin story for Peter Pan, and I liked the world they created. And some chapters were really quite amusing. But, in the end, it just didn’t grab me the way some other books have.

Now to read the rest of the vacation pile.