Maiden Voyager

Maiden Voyager

R. Edward Main

Five Star, Nov 2005, $25.95, 273 pp.

ISBN 159414206

The Void, a way of traveling from Point A to Point B, is the way people and objects move through space. Pilots use the power of their minds to move gigantic ships with passengers and cargoes through the Void. One of the best pilots Jack Claver, who has a ten plus rating, is missing. Even when he is in the Void, his daughter Jackie, also with a mental rating of ten plus, can sense him, which is why she knows he isn't dead when the authorities tell her his ship was lost in the Void.

Jackie plans to rescue him, and she uses the insurance money to hire a Void pilot and a hopper to go into the Void. Once they reach the Void, the pilot dies and Jackie finds herself on a world populated by strange creatures and vegetation that looks like it came from a human based planet. Her plan is to find her father, rescue him and escape the Void world, but that is more complicated than she knows because this world holds many secrets, and getting out might prove impossible.

MAIDEN VOYAGER is a very entertaining work filled with original ideas, kind of like placing the Hotel California in deep space. The secrets of the Void world is just one of the reasons readers will finish the book in one sitting. The heroine, a seventeen year old sheltered teen, is determined to achieve her goals of saving her father, the other inhabitants of the Void world and find a way to escape. Her strength and determination makes her an admiral protagonist who readers hope will succeed.

Harriet Klausner