“If you ever plan to hang around train stations in the middle of the night, you should always make sure you can hear your own footsteps, and, if you are at all musical, you should try to work out which notes you make as you walk, as it stops you from being lonely, not that I ever get lonely” (3). This is Alice Butler, the pleasingly quirky narrator of this novel, in a train station on her way to a work retreat. Alice works at a big toy company called PopCo (it’s smaller than Hasbro and Mattel, but not much), in an “Ideation and Design” department. From the start of the book she’s aware that toy companies are not entirely warm and fuzzy: “We are in the business of the new and shiny, the biggest and the best, the glittery and magical, the fast and addictive. The toy industry has two big advantages over other industries. Our products are the easiest to sell, and our customers are the easiest to sell to” (7). But Alice feels reasonably good about the products she works on, which fall under three brands themed around spies, detectives, and code-breakers, with a fourth brand, maybe about survival skills, to be added soon. The work retreat, though, makes Alice think differently about things: a group at the retreat is tasked with coming up with a product to sell to teen girls, and hears from various specialists in market research, branding, and so on; meanwhile, Alice learns more about other people at PopCo and what they do (e.g. someone whose job is to create fictional online personas—presented as if they were real teen customers—to promote PopCo products). “It’s all dishonest,” a co-worker says to Alice, at one point, and Alice finds herself agreeing: “She’s right. The way the products are designed, focus-grouped, manufactured, and sold. It’s all dishonest, all of it” (415).
But the story of the novel isn’t just the story of Alice’s growing disillusion with PopCo: that present-day narrative alternates with the story of Alice’s childhood. We learn that Alice’s mother died and that her father left, leaving her to live with her mom’s parents. Alice’s grandmother is a mathematician working on the Riemann hypothesis; Alice’s grandfather makes crosswords and other thinking puzzles and breaks codes, including one big one: the (fictional) Stevenson/Heath manuscript, which gives the location of buried treasure. But Alice’s grandfather won’t tell anyone the solution, because the treasure is buried in a spot that’s now a bird sanctuary: he doesn’t want treasure-hunters disturbing the birds, and the treasure was never the point for him: the puzzle was. But he gives Alice a necklace with a code on it, which she is sure is related to the treasure. So there’s that bit of the story, and lots about Alice helping her grandfather with his work (he teachers her about ciphers and prime factorization, and sets her to counting words and letters in documents he’s trying to decode), and then there’s also the normal-life bits of Alice’s childhood: school and friends and boys and the difficulties of being a teenage girl, maybe especially if you’re smart and loner-ish.
And there’s another mystery, too: in the present-day story, Alice starts getting messages in code while she’s at the work retreat. They’re pretty vague and she’s not sure who’s sending them, or why: does it relate to the treasure and her necklace, or is it something else entirely? And oh, there’s a bit of romance, and also some bits about Go and sailing and the moors and old hill forts. If this all sounds like a lot, it is, but it doesn’t feel like too much: I like all the disparate bits and digressions of this book, and I like Alice’s narrative voice a lot. There’s one bit where she’s coming down with a cold that felt so real and familiar and vivid, the way that when you’re getting sick, everything can sometimes be almost hyperreal, in sharp focus, until the point where you realize how awful you feel. Unfortunately, the end of the book lost me a bit: the story of Alice’s disillusion with PopCo and with consumerism in general ends up being a bit heavy-handed. More pleasing: the fact that there’s a cryptic crossword at the end of the book for readers to do!
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