The First Sister was part of 2023’s winter holiday book exchange and it ended in such a way that I was curious about the rest of the series. As I found both at a brick and mortar shop, I decided to give The Second Rebel (science fiction, 504 pages) by Linden A. Lewis a chance.

“Astrid has reclaimed her voice and now seeks to bring down the Sisterhood from within. But she quickly discovers that the business of politics is far deadlier than she ever expected. On an outlaw colony station deep in space, Hiro val Akira chases the rumors of a digital woman who could be a dangerous ally in the rebellion. Meanwhile, Lito sol Lucius, continuing to grow into his role as a lead revolutionary, is tasked with rescuing an Aster operative from deep within an Icarii prison. Back on Venus, Lito’s sister, Lucinia, must carry on after her brother’s disappearance and the accusation of treason by Icarii authorities. She keeps her nose clean … until an Aster revolutionary shows up with new about Lito’s fate and an opportunity to join the fight.”

THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW

My original comments from my book review of The First Sister are still very applicable here. In fact, I think I’ll just copy my opening paragraph from that.

“I have a lot of thoughts about this book and I’m not quite sure which ones will actually show up in this review. As a general rule, I tend to not write up reviews for books not to my taste with living authors, as I understand how hard writing novels is and how much words can cause damage, even words on a tiny website with no influence. So while I have read the entire Red Rising series by Pierce Brown, you will not find any reviews to that series here. When the First Sister arrived as part of the winter holiday book exchange and the comment on the back indicated if you enjoyed Red Rising, you would enjoy this book, I was immediately leery.”

This book takes the truly terrible future for women and actually makes it worse, which is mildly surprising. So while women are mentioned in a variety of roles, as Daggers, Rapiers, wealthy-born artists, actresses, etc., the vast majority of the poor and less fortunate women in this series are now being stolen as part of trafficking rings to grab young girls, drug them, and put them into low-level brothels with the funding and backing of high-level members of the Sisterhood.

I think what this book and series does accomplish is to shine light on how any human society will prey on the down-trodden, poor, societally unacceptable, and “other”. The good news, though, is when evidence of those crimes is presented to the mass public, many people rise to demonstrations, demanding accountability for those crimes. But if this series continues to follow the trends of our current real-world, those in power who order all these atrocities will face no actual repercussions from their damaging actions. Those in power can destroy entire cultures and civilizations and shrug it off because at the end of the day, they still have power, money, resources, and influence.

Now. This book is still the second book in a trilogy. And most second books are the dark and hopeless part of the story, where things are supposed to be extra grave. Things aren’t supposed to go well, because if they did, why would there be a third book? This book (and this series in general, to be honest) continues showing the darkness of humanity’s future. If you enjoy books where your main characters struggle with absolutely everything in their entire lives and things get continuously worse for them, and if you like reading books where those in power use and abuse everyone without money or those they designate as “lesser” to them with no hopes of low-level people living free and authentic lives, then this book is definitely for you.

I think I still need to reserve full judgment until I finish reading the entire series, but I think this would be a two on my rating scale. Without knowing how the series ends and addresses a lot of the over-arching concerns, I don’t know that I would read it again.

Lewis, Linden. The Second Rebel. Skybound Books, 2021.