This final book in Anne Simon's 'Tales of Marylene' trilogy (after The Song of Aglaia and Empress Cixtisis), Boris the Potato Child delivers a bitter critique of our consumerist impulses and abuses. Mixing literature and pop culture (such as mashing Simone de Beauvoir with the Beatles), Simon has created in Marylene a world as abundant in visual imagination as Oz or Narnia but crafted with a Swiftian pen that's mightier than any man's sword.