An entertaining intergalactic Hunger Games, with less devastation, more friendship, action, and adventure with an uplifting ending.
Feature image credit: Allen & Unwin
The Surface Trials are an intrinsic part of the human experience — think Survivor on a strange planet — now in its 50th year! Watched by billions, The Surface Trials takes 100 successful applicants, teams them up in groups of five, drops them onto a hostile planet of the producers’ choosing, and pits them against the habitat for three days, all while having them attempt to solve a series of puzzles. The top 20 go on to enter StarQuest Academy. Simple, right?
Not so much if you throw in a disguised member of the Galactic Royal Dynasty as a competitor, combined with a young girl from a devastated home world known for producing individuals with psychic abilities, whose abilities activate mid-trials with potentially disastrous consequences.
Amethyst Antares dreams of leaving her home world of Proxima and entering the Academy. Her home planet has been a pawn in the Galactic Royal Family’s power games since the devastating Mindbreaker Wars, and suspected Mindbreakers are tested and vanished without trace or explanation. Now she is in the thick of it, her abilities have activated, and the Trials just took an unexpected turn.
HM Waugh is a Perth-based youth fiction writer, educator, and environmental scientist. The Surface Trials is her third sci-fi novel — preceded by Mars Awakens and Mars Underground — and is a gripping tale of friendship under pressure.
The presentation of the novel is enhanced by the 60 chapter titles drawn from The Surface Trials Rules of Play and interspersed with StarQuest Academy memos, as the producers monitor the on-planet activities and the plight of the Royal contestant.
Much like its similar predecessor, The Hunger Games, this novel’s action moves like a slipstreaming starship, relentless and unstoppable, with twists, turns and well-placed humour, that make it a guilty pleasure for older readers to enjoy.
It concludes with a few unanswered questions, which may indicate that a StarQuest Academy-based sequel is in the works. This reviewer wouldn’t be opposed to that, at all.
Reviewed by Glen Christie
The views expressed in this review belong to the author and not Glam Adelaide, its affiliates, or employees.
Distributed by: Allen & Unwin
Release Date: April 2025
Price: $18.99
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