by A. Marshall

Created on: August 20, 2009

Popco is a contemporary novel set in Devon, England. The title refers to the name of a fictitious toy company, the third biggest in the world after Mattel and Hasbro. It is told from the first person perspective of Alice Butler, a young woman who works for PopCo in their Ideation and Design department. Almost everyone in Ideation and Design is young, very cool and addicted to following fashion trends, which currently mean everyone dresses like college kids from Tokyo. Alice stands out as she has her own style, but her dilemma is, if she dresses like them she fits in, and if she doesn't dress like them she is cool, daring and individualistic and therefore still fits in.

At the beginning of the novel, Alice travels to the PopCo Open World event at the company's 'thought camp' at Hare Hall, a vast mansion in Devon. She is preoccupied with a new toy she is designing, an addition to a series of spy toys she has created. Alice is specially suited for this kind of work due to her code-cracking skills, something she has learned from her grandparents, who were involved in deciphering codes during the war.

At Hare Hall, Alice meets up with her colleague Dan a videogame designer, and after the initial presentation by the CEO they are summoned back to a meeting of selected employees. These have been chosen for their special skills to stay on after the PopCo Open World conference, to secretly work on a new toy design. Alice agrees to stay, but is puzzled when she begins to receive secret coded messages from someone at Hare Hall. She also starts to become ill and spends a lot of time in her room taking Bach Flower remedies as she recovers. More coded messages arrive and she tries to find out who is sending them, she also reflects on the past that brought her here. In a series of flashbacks we find out about her upbringing with her grandparents and her grandfather's lifelong obsession with solving codes. It's all connected to a locket that Alice's grandfather had given her containing a secret code she has never managed to crack, but which has something to do with the location of buried treasure.

Popco is densely packed with stories within stories. There is the story of the buried treasure, the story of her grandparents, and Alice's own story of her school and college years. As Alice tries to think up ideas for new toys, she reflects back on the trends and social codes of her school days that influenced her own purchases. It reveals toy companies' cynical manipulation

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