The Sunbearer Trials

This book was a bit disappointing. The main character, Teo, is irritating and childish, and his romance with Aurelio is predictable and uninteresting. The only character I really liked was Xio, but I'm guessing he's not going to be featured very prominently, or in the same way as in this book. I found almost all of the characters to have very surface level personalities, with little depth to keep me interested. There were also way too many characters. Along with Teo, Niya, Xio, and Aurelio, there were six other prominent characters which meant it was difficult to find time to get to know their characters, meaning any interactions they had with Teo were pretty much interchangeable (apart from with Auristela and Ocelo, but they both felt like over exaggerated bully characters).
Speaking of interactions, I feel like I read the phrase ‘a laugh bucked in Teo's chest' or ‘Xio hid his laugh' about fifty times - these characters were constantly laughing about very unfunny conversations, which just made it seem like the author was trying to convince you they were funny when they really weren't.
A lot of the plot was also very predicable - Teo becomes Sunbearer and refuses to sacrifice the loser, although that whole scene went a lot faster than I was expecting. I was at about page 370 when I realised this wasn't actually a stand alone novel, so make of that what you will.

Okay, I did just complain a whole bunch there, but this book wasn't all bad. It does have brilliant worldbuilding. While I wasn't expecting this story to be set in the modern world, I grew used to it quickly, and liked how a lot of the Gods' powers became used in a modern setting. It was cool to see the differences between Golds and Jades, and each semidiose between each other. It was also great to see a lot of non-binary representation. (Although I did notice two instances where a non-binary character was misgendered. Once for Ocelo, and once for Sol, both being misgendered with he/him pronouns. I don't know if this was an accident by the author or by an editor but it's very strange for something like this to make it to final print, and it's really disappointing to see these characters being misgendered.)

I did find Teo's transness to be quite difficult to read about, as my trans experience as someone only slightly younger than him has been very different and difficult, so it is possible that my personal struggle with seeing other trans people with exactly what I want (which I know I ought to overcome) may have diminished my enjoyment of this book somewhat.

Despite its flaws, I am looking forward to reading the second book in this series. (And also very excited to see the cover of the next book, as this one is utterly gorgeous!)