Scarlett Thomas has quickly become one of my favourite writers of all time and PopCo is the first one I read followed by The End of Mr. Y (which confused me to no end). I was smitten.
Her writing reminds me a little of Haruki Murakami’s, which coincidentally is also one of my favourite writers of all time. PopCo is about Alice, the quirky toy designer who works in PopCo and went for a company retreat. Other than all the talk about toy design (which I LOVED because I’m designer and I’m familiar with all the designing progress), Alice is also a code breaker. When her Grandpa died he left her the code and the necklace which would lead to a treasure. Alice spent most of her life trying to crack the code but she couldn’t. Meanwhile in the company retreat she got a message in codes too. With all this going on, really you wouldn’t get bored reading this one. I also feel like I actually learn some stuff after reading PopCo (stuff about mathematics and codes!) and it’s not really that heavy of a read too. The ending was awful though. Alice solved the code on her necklace and she found the treasure but it wasn’t explained how.