As I read this book I was confused about who the target demographic might be. I thought it read like a YA book, but used darker language than the average YA book. I enjoy YA and I enjoy adult mystery/thriller/horror. This book just felt unbalanced to me. My brain wanted to compartmentalize it and I couldn't.
The premise was good. The twists were engaging. But I don't know who I would recommend read it. Not the folks I recommend read YA. It seems dark for them. Not my mystery/thriller friends. It seems a little juvenile for them. So it's an entertaining book in the middle.

A secret society. World as an illusion. Evil empires, but hidden. Masonic illuminati conspiracy theory shit. Murder, depravity, control. A plot or a fluke. Terror beyond your wildest dreams. It should be so much fun to read. But it just isnt.

2.75 stars, if I'm being generous.

Not for the faint-hearted or squeamish! When I started this book, my first thoughts were: Aha, a boys’ book, will I persevere? Then I saw the reading time of eight hours plus. I could not fathom how a book that starts with a guy drawing strange-looking money from an ATM could entertain for that long. Next thing I know, I’m halfway through. The protagonist and everyone around him gets drawn into this sinister gruesome world that is the Papyrus Empire. Life is cheap and a person is utterly expendable, especially if they break the rules of secrecy that shroud this society. The mood and despair of it reminded me of a modern version of Coraghessan Boyle’s Water Music. Sometimes felt like stuck in a nightmare computer game with a wicked, ultradark, brutal plot, yet strangely addictive...

What a fun read! A very twisty thriller that makes some very deft comments about class. Similar to other readers, the blurb enticed me but you quickly realise that it undersells the story.

What an absolute belter of a book. Nothing I have read has come close to such a wonderful, disturbing & haunting story. From the moment you are introduced to Tommy you are swept away on a monumental adventure. This is a book where you'll feel repulsed but slightly excited as to how the system gets its way and what it takes to rise to the top

This ARC was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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Thomas Duchesne withdraws money of a strange currency from a cash machine. At first, he thinks it's a prank, but as he starts to use the money in different places he realises there is an entirely different world that thrives under everyone's noses.

The blurb was what pulled me in for this book. The idea of a hidden society that lives right under our noses was intriguing. I didn't think it was a new idea, but the cover pulled me the rest of the way in. Once I hit the 20-page mark, I realised how much the blurb was understating the amazing storyline.

Let's start with the characters. The story is all told from Thomas' perspective. It is an absolute delight to read. From the very start, Thomas is shown to be a character that feels very strongly for his friends and is unafraid of standing up for them. Thomas is a very complex character and I absolutely loved how his emotions are revealed only to the reader in certain situations that he faces, but the other characters he is interacting with are unaware of what he's going through. Felix and Levinas were the other characters that I really enjoyed reading about. As strange as this sounds, I think most of the books I've read have ended up with me liking a side character more than the protagonist, but that is not the case for this one. Other than Thomas, I loved knowing more about Levinas. He doesn't appear for much of the book but the little time he gets is deeply impactful on its own.

This brings me to the writing. Saunders does not spell things out for you. There are intricacies in the dialogue and he expects the reader to figure them out. The writing is not overly flowery, in fact, it contains just the right amount of metaphors and literary phrases to keep the reader engaged. There were some grammar mistakes that I noticed, but they were not so distracting that I lost track while reading. There was one scene (at the Rosenthal Manor, I believe) where I was a little lost about what was going on. It made sense, though because the main character was on drugs and not in control of his senses. This part was where the strongest allusion to magic or supernatural elements was made in this book. Throughout the whole book, it seemed to me that magic did not exist at all and everything that seemed like magic was simply an illusion, but that one scene might have been alluding to something more. I'm not complaining but I would really love it if this series stayed magic-free, it's done amazing so far and the intrigue will only be amped up more without adding a magic system or supernatural elements to the mix.

The setting is a peaceful town that inevitably gets involved in the Papyrus Empire's internal war. The Empire itself is vividly imagined, a place created by ambitious people with good intentions. The first quarter of the book had this underlying sense of creepiness. The people in strange masks and suits and the murder of Thomas' friend Felix all add to the growing feeling that something is very wrong in the Empire.

The plot is the real deal here. I suppose some people might find it meanders, but I think it's very collected and focused. The story puts us in the action right from the first page, and background information is revealed slowly as we progress. It is sprinkled in the right places, and in digestible amounts, never too much at once. There are so many twists and turns and I think I only partially predicted one of them. The anticipation of the next twist alone was a great way to engage the reader. I read this over the span of a week or so and yet I never once felt that the pace slowed down or that what I was reading was filler material and not part of the main plotline. As for that ending, I'm just going to say that I cannot WAIT for book 2.

Overall, I'll give this one 4.9 stars. Not a full 5 because of the grammar mistakes I noticed and that one scene at the Rosenthal Manor where I felt things could have been explained a teensy bit more without breaking the drug-induced experience of the main character. Thank you to NetGalley for providing an electronic copy of this book. I would love to read this again in a hard copy format.
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Short review on Litsy:
(to be posted once the book is available for reviewing on Litsy)