The novel “Rejuvenation Book 2” by Byddi Lee was published for the first time in 2020. It’s the second book in the Rejuvenation trilogy and follows “Rejuvenation Book 1“.
Bobbie Chan is on the run with a diverse group of people, and the only hope seems to be a resistance group that is trying to create serious opposition to the global corporate government. The journey is even more difficult due to the instabilities present in the mountain tops that still sprout from the seas and cause landslides and other dangers.
“Rejuvenation Book 2” is the second part of a great story set in a not too distant future where the world is under threat of a potential alien invasion. To understand the protagonists and the events you need to read “Rejuvenation Book 1”.
From the beginning, the story has been marked by surprising discoveries made by Bobbie Chan, initially in the course of her work as a geriatrician and then extending them in the adventure she ends up living. The protagonist is the kind of person who has always worked professionally and has always trusted her rulers. When she discovered strange experiments on the ultra-elders, she didn’t believe they were backed by someone very high up, and accepting that she might be wrong is difficult. Some of the discoveries involved people close to her and this shook her confidence in her ability to judge people.
In some ways, the second novel is marked even more than the first by surprises and twists with a lot of action. Whenever Bobbie Chan seems to be able to digest one shock, another comes quickly, sometimes even greater. These are events that keep the pace fast throughout the book, as the protagonists and themes were introduced in the first book. Those events are also useful to provide more information, and in various cases other points of view, regarding the society that was formed in that future after the alien invasion attempt was rejected.
Bobbie Chan’s traveling companions are also important characters in this novel and others are added besides the ones present from the beginning but Bobbie remains the protagonist. She doesn’t become a rebel overnight after spending years as a loyal supporter of the government but she faces inner turmoil with so many doubts about what she’s doing. All this makes her a complex and realistic character in the various facets that are shown in the course of her search for the truth.
Bobbie Chan’s family remains important in the story and is at the center of some of the twists and turns in this second book. Honestly, I preferred the use of the problems related to that family made in the first book because in this sequel they sometimes seem a bit trivial and used only to help increase the protagonist’s shock.
“Rejuvenation Book 2” hasn’t an end, as it’s the second part of a trilogy. Despite my doubts about a few twists, overall, it seemed to me that it works well to be the central book of a trilogy. It confirms the intriguing elements I saw in the first book and leaves me with good hopes for the final book of the Rejuvenation trilogy, which you need to read in order to make a global judgment on its big story.
