PopCo by Scarlett Thomas

It’s been a while since I’ve been properly disappointed in a book. I must have been lucky because I’ve had a run of books recently that I’ve really enjoyed (I have reviewed some of them here but I have some more to do).

The book is PopCo by Scarlett Thomas. It’s all about a girl called Alice Butler who grew up with her code breaking grandparents (after her mother died and her father disappeared) and who now works for a toy company designing new toys. It is a novel with two distinct threads – the coding, mathematics and patterns of the world Alice grew up in, and the team-building nonsense of a PopCo retreat which turns into something a bit more sinister (just a bit, though).

( Spoilers )