The Sunbearer Trials by Aiden Thomas

Have you ever wished you were reading Percy Jackson or the Hunger Games, but not like, actually reading them, just reading, maybe, a shittier knockoff version of them? Then boy, do I have the book for you! The Sunbearer Trials by Aiden Thomas asks bold questions such as, I wonder if my local library has the Hunger Games, and, I’m checking out the Hunger Games on Libby right now instead of reading this book, and, while I’m at it, I wonder if the original Percy Jackson holds up.

Never heard of the Sunbearer Trials? Just close your eyes, and let Bastard Reviews take you by the hand, leading you once more into the fray of mediocre young adult novels written by Twitter-addled west coast twenty-somethings who think a Canva infographic shared on their Instagram story is activism.

The Worldbuilding.

The book starts with a little mythology.

First, Tierra brought forth gold from deep within the earth, and Sol shaped it into the Golds.

Ah yes, the golds were made from gold. Sure. Seems reasonable. You could name them something besides the Golds but that would probably make it tricky to keep track of more than one name. Gold = gold. Reasonable.

Next, Tierra brought forth jade from the caverns where the ocean met the shore, and Sol shaped it into the Jades.

Oh, what were the jades made from? Jade? Right, yeah, silly of me to think differently.

Last, Tierra brought forth obsidian from the edges of the earth’s hottest flames, and Sol shaped it into the Obsidians.

You’ll never guess what the Obsidians were made from.

The intro then explains that the Golds are the most powerful, the Jades are less powerful, and the Obsidians are evil. All of them. Evil. Why are the black ones the evil ones? Don’t worry about it. The evil Obsidians try to overthrow Sol who does some alchemy or something and turns into the sun, and also some sun stones. The sun stones keep the obsidians in the sky as constellations and have to be powered by a demigod being sacrificed every 10 years or else the evil obsidians will escape. We don’t want that, because they’re all so evil. Why are they evil? Don’t worry about it. Isn’t it kind of weird and essentialist that some of the gods are inherently evil and some are inherently good? Don’t worry about it.

So a demigod has to be sacrificed every 10 years to keep the sun stones burning. Thus is born the Sunbearer Trials, where demigods compete in a series of challenges for the ultimate honor, to win and… not be sacrificed. It’s actually the loser who’s sacrificed. The winner just gets a crown or something.

This is where my problem with the Sunbearer Trials as a mechanism lies. The entire society is built around the idea that a child must be ritually killed every 10 years. It would be much more interesting if the sacrifice was seen as a huge honor, and the winner of the trials was sacrificed. That way the characters would all be striving to win, only realizing at the end of the book when the sacrifice happens that it’s actually very fucked up.

Instead of this being the case, all the characters enter the trials afraid of losing and being sacrificed. But where’s the honor in that? Where’s the glory in not dying for your god? Not making the ultimate sacrifice? You have the opportunity to lay down your life for your god, the source of light, the banisher of darkness, and you say, uh, isn’t killing kinda bad? :/ Come on! Their entire religion is supposedly organized around this sacrifice, but none of them want it? This is weenie hut jr. worldbuilding! If Aiden had just swapped this one point, the focus would have been entirely about the idea of sacrificing oneself for your god, and the story would have had much, much more tension than it does. Which is zero. This story had zero tension. Most of the time it was outright boring.

Back to the worldbuilding. There’s a whole pantheon of gods in this story and they are all named extremely creatively: the ol’ ‘let’s put the name in Spanish and no one will know!’ strategy. We have Sol, the god of… the sun. Tierra, god of the..earth. Agua. God of water. Amor, love god. Primavera, god of spring. Mala Suerte… god of bad luck. And so on. Really, I’m jealous of all the creativity and skill that went into creating this pantheon. I mean, how could I top Water, the god of water?

With a warm smile and sticky-sweet personality, Diosa Pan Dulce was one of Teo’s favorite people. She was short with soft curves and wore her hair in braided spirals on either side of her head like novia sweet bread.

Special shout-out to my favorite god name in this book, God Sweet Bread, the god of sweet bread, who wears her hair in buns on the side of her head that look like sweet bread. Because she’s the sweet bread god of bread god bread. Bread god.

Another strange thing about the worldbuilding is the question of when and where this is exactly set. The book is written like it’s set in modern-day Mexico with the inclusion of gods and demigods and stuff on top, which would be the Percy Jackson approach. But it’s not set in Mexico, it’s set in an alternate fantasy world with fantasy geography, fantasy cities, and fantasy landmarks. This makes the constant allusion to modern real-world stuff like Vine, Tiktok, the Internet, and YouTube very bizarre. I kept thinking stuff like, so, where exactly are the other continents? Is there a fantasy North America? Fantasy Asia? Or is the entirety of this world fantasy Mexico? Was there a fantasy Y2k? A fantasy wwii? Is fantasy Mexico really fantasy Mexico if there are no fantasy Catholics? It’s never explained. I guess I shouldn’t have asked.

Speaking of geography, this landmass or continent or whatever the fuck it is that they live on is pretty laughably devised. I mean, it doesn’t even seem like Aiden googled ‘mapmaking for dnd campaign 101,’ which, let’s be real, is like the baseline level of effort for making a fantasy world. The competitors in the trial have to travel from one city to the next for every trial. Every city is connected by river, and they go to a new city every day, making it seem like the travel time between every single city on the entire continent is..about a day. This travel time never changes, like Aiden just imagined all the cities as being lined up in a row with a river connecting them all. At one point, a big deal is made about a city they go to being suuuper hard to get to, super uninhabitable and hostile, and in the middle of the desert. They get to this city…by boat in about a day. I don’t know about you, but a city that’s next to a river a day’s travel away from the last city isn’t exactly hard to get to. Even weirder, the biomes change between cities, like every forest, swamp, rainforest, and desert is only about a day’s travel wide. Like Minecraft biomes or something.

The Sunbearer Trials is also a televised event. Supposedly. We never actually see any, like, evidence of that. If you recall the Hunger Games, the idea that the Games are televised is central to the plot. It affects every way that the characters behave. Every choice they make before and during the games is related to their screen presence. They need to perform well on screen because of the inclusion of sponsors, who might decide if they live or die. There’s nothing like that in the Sunbearer Trials. The world filled with humans that are supposedly super invested in this event that should be on par with the Superbowl just… doesn’t exist. The audience never affects the plot. Most of the time, I forgot that was an aspect of the story entirely until I would be surprised by a sudden reference to a jumbotron or something.

The human world is also a huge issue in this book. Specifically, the lack of the human world. Our main character Percy, I mean Teo, has been raised in the human world his whole life and went to human high school. However, Teo has no human friends from high school- his only friends are other demigods. We don’t see any scenes of him in school, interacting with humans. Teo’s human parent is nowhere to be found in this story, and he only cares about his godly parent, Quetzal. Thus, he has absolutely no ties to the mortal world, making it strange that he would care about mortals at all. Why not give him a human best friend, instead of only demigod friends? Why not give him a human parent? In contrast, in Percy Jackson, the most important figure in Percy’s life is his human mother, and needing to save her is the only reason he agrees to go on the adventure at all, giving the story depth, nuance, characterization. All things that the Sunbearer Trials lacks.

The Plot.

Okay, so, Teo has been chosen to compete in the Sunbearer Trials. This is supposed to be a big deal, because lowly Jades are never chosen. Only Golds. We are told this approximately 800 times via exposition. I get it, okay? Teo is a Jade. I get it.

Teo, some Golds, and another Jade named Xio are all competing. Teo gets attached to Rue, I mean Xio, because he’s super young and wimpy and Teo doesn’t want him to die. Teo is pretty wimpy himself, but we’ll get into that later.

Every trial is a video game plot. Characters have to retrieve x number of magical orbs/stones/gizmos without getting hit by obstacles, or climb a big thing and press buttons without getting hit by obstacles, or search through a temple without getting hit by obstacles. I can’t even remember any of the individual trials because they were all the same. In basically every trial, Teo thinks he’s doing badly, but then he actually does okay, and then Xio gets last place, which stresses out Teo. There are like 8 trials all with the same character beats. Moving on.

At the end of the story (seriously, I’m struggling to think of a single significant event until the end) Teo somehow wins Sunbearer, and realizes it means he has to sacrifice the loser, who ends up being the sister of his romantic interest. Teo decides not to do it, then Xio betrays everyone, reveals he was an evil Obsidian all along, and frees all the evil Obsidians from the sky. The evil Obsidians open a big pit in the ground that a bunch of the demigods fall into, then Teo and friends decide to go find all the broken pieces of the sol stones (video game plot much?) to defeat the evil Obsidians and rescue the other demigods. Cue sequel.

And yeah, that’s everything that happens. For the majority of the book, there are absolutely no stakes and there is no urgency. We’re supposed to care about Xio always being in last place, but Xio is so unbelievably shitty at every trial that I started thinking, like, hey, just let him die? Teo himself is never really in any danger of losing. Also, if you refer to my summary, you’ll notice that Teo refuses to sacrifice the sacrifice. Which means that no one in this book… actually dies. Seriously. A book with the Hunger Games as a comp title has no character deaths. Amateur hour!! I want blood and guts! If characters are engaged in a deadly competition, my primary attitude on reading the book should not be one of boredom.

The Characters

Our protagonist, Teo, is a trans boy demigod who appears to be some kind of self-insert wish fulfillment fantasy for the type of person who walked the mile in high school, tried to get out of gym class because they have anxiety, and finds talking to McDonald’s cashiers to be an intimidating social interaction. Teo has the strength of an invalid victorian maiden, the personality of a shivering, elderly chihuahua, and the moral backbone of a pine nut. He sidles into every challenge whining about how scared he is and how he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and despite this, the narrative jumps through some impressive hoops to land him on top of the other competitors, through no achievement of his own. At no point does he display cunning, intelligence, strength, fighting skills, magical skills, or any other quality that might give the reader a clue to why he’s the protagonist. Often, at pivotal moments, Teo stands there saying nothing because he’s so scared, allowing all the other characters to affect the plot. The author attempts to compensate for Teo's lack of personality with some weak attempts at humor, but given that all the jokes in this book are ripped from popular tweets, it doesn’t really land. At one point, Teo comedically finds it impossible to lift a 30 pound weight, and it pins him to the ground, which implies that Teo could be overpowered by a human toddler.

One of Teo’s friends is Korra, I mean Niya, who seems to be crafted to appeal to online weirdos who constantly post about wanting various fictional women to step on them. I found Niya’s character to be kind of disturbing, as the narration and dialogue is constantly focused on her body, specifically her thighs. All of Niya’s dialogue goes something like, “Hey guys! I’m so stupid I don’t know what common words mean! Good thing I have giant, swollen, glistening thighs and huge honking tiddies to make up for it! I don’t find this depiction of women to be weird at all!”

Teo also has a romantic storyline with a character named Aurelio, who has fire powers or something. The romantic scenes were incredibly repetitive. The same exact scene happened a good 3-4 times. Here’s my imitation:

Teo went into the gym because he was starting to think being fit would be a good idea if he wanted to climb the ranks in the sunbearer trials. Aurelio was already in there, exercising with his shirt off and his golden skin. ‘Crap,’ thought Teo. He marched over to a random machine, trying not to look at Aurelio’s skin. It can’t be that hard to use this thing, Teo thought. He grabbed a random lever and immediately slipped and fell. Aurelio walked over. “Do you need help?” said Aurelio. “Don’t tell me what to do!” said Teo. It was so annoying how Aurelio lorded over Teo being a Gold.

I kid you not that the same confrontation in the gym takes place a SOLID three or four times with no change. The conflict between them (that Aurelio is supposedly being clique-y like the other Golds) doesn’t work at all, because Aurelio is so transparently just trying to help and be nice. It makes Teo look like a giant asshole who’s constantly yelling at him for no reason. And then suddenly they’re in a relationship or something. I don’t know. Whatever.

Racism

For the god of harvest, the tall and lanky dios didn’t look like he ate much. He had a long face, a wide nose, earth-rich black skin, and eyes the color of tobacco leaves that were currently glaring at Teo and Niya.

Before the Incident, Maize had had shiny cornrows that fell to the middle of his back.

Yes, I’m giving this character his own section because he bothered me so much. The god of harvest is a Black man (named Corn) who is described as having literally black skin. Not ‘brown skin so dark it was almost black’ but literally. Black skin. He also is described as having eyes the color of tobacco and… as having had cornrows. Now, anyone with two braincells to bang together knows that tobacco as a crop has certain connotations with regard to American slavery. I really would like to know why that crop, of ALL crops, is the one that came to mind when describing this character. Like, what on earth compels someone to write, essentially, ‘Corn, the god of corn, had cornrows because he was black and he looked like tobacco.’ Please.

Popularity

Okay, you might be wondering. Okay, so the characters are wack, the worldbuilding is wack, the plot is nothing. Why is anyone reading this book at all?

I would like to give credit where credit is good. Aiden Thomas is not, in my opinion, a particularly gifted author. He is, however, very savvy with social media and promotion. The Sunbearer Trials was promoted with an extremely aggressive social media campaign involving all kinds of merch, special editions, and character trading cards.

Each character was revealed one at a time with accompanying art and the promise that you could win a mystery trading card with your preorder of THE SUNBEARER TRIALS!!! The characters were accompanied by bulleted lists of why you were sure to love them. Identities (Sapphic! Trans boy! Nonbinary goblin!) featured prominently on the character introductions, no matter how much or little those identities and characteristics were featured in the text of the book itself. (At least one trans character and several ‘sapphic’ or ‘bisexual’ characters, by my estimation, made it the entire book without their identity coming up at all. There were no characters described in their trading card as lesbians.) Easy to swallow characteristics and Twitter-poisoned phrases made up the rest of the bulleted lists. (Herbo! Goth daddy! Youngest Child Syndrome!)

Tweets in all caps full of keysmashing about how great Sunbearer Trials is were retweeted constantly by Aiden. Special editions were announced frequently. And this was all before the book even came out. All those people couldn’t be wrong about the book, right? All those tweets couldn’t be… lying?! I mean, it’s not like just anyone can create a twitter account, then tweet ‘AKSJHEKJHGHG SCREAMING CRYING AT THE END OF SUNBEARER TRIALS ARC,’ right? …Right??

You like stickers, right?? There’s stickers, too! Surely just any old book can’t have adorable chibi stickers.

And the special editions! There are so many! Wondering how much these cost, I put together a price list for everyone:

Rainbow Crate: $45

B&N: $18.99

Regular Edition: $17.99

Obsidian Moon Crate: $20

Fae Crate: $33.32 OR $43.42

Adding about $7 in shipping for each item, the total comes up to around $180. I mean, imagine spending $180 on a book and it’s not very good. Would you say anything? Or would you just go on twitter, post ‘THE SUNBEARER TRIALS ENDED MY LIFE [CRYING EMOJI],’ and try and convince yourself that you actually liked it?

Now, do I think that everyone who enjoyed the Sunbearer Trials is a liar? Of course not! I am a firm believer that there are many, many people out there with incredibly bad taste.

Rating: 0/5 bastards.