Review: TRAVELER by S.E. Anderson

Traveler by S.E. Anderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sally’s search for Earth isn’t off to a good start: chased out of her hotel room and into the broom closet of a spaceship, she’s accidentally become a stowaway on the Alliance Flagship, Traveler.

But when sabotage and murder show the crew’s true colors, Zander and Blayde are forced to stay and help them out of their mess. Lies, drama, and deceit lead them light years away to a mysterious planet on the edge of the galaxy, where the crew must band together just to stay alive. Which would be much easier if they didn’t have to deal with a diva first-mate, a droid with a religious obsession, and Blayde’s Ex whose brain is a spaceship.

Finding Earth has to be put on the back burner, as Sally’s stuck tending alien boo-boos - and she still has no idea what she’s doing. And she might not live long enough to get off the planet in one piece.

Traveler is the third book in S.E. Anderson’s Starstruck Saga and I think it might just be my favourite yet. It follows the usual crew—Sally, Zander, and Blayde—as they become stuck on a broken spaceship...only to discover everything is not as it seems and there are definite bad guys hanging among them.

This book has so many twists! I was actually speechless with the one early on involving the ship’s crew! And equally, the one at the 75% mark involving Kork surprised me too. I totally did not see that coming.

And Kork—okay, I loved him. He’s definitely my favourite character now. (Sorry, Zander!)

The last quarter of this book was what really made it an absolutely fantastic read for me. Everything came together and I loved how it reminded us of things in the first two books, pulling on strands of those plots and incorporating them into the end of book three—yet doing this in a way that still leaves an unanswered question for the next book. Because of this amalgamation of different plot elements, Traveler has a ‘wider’ feel than the other two books, and Sally also seems more mature and we see more character growth from her.

The other thing I loved about this book was the Star Trek references! Adding this contemporary angle to a book which takes place in the near future and involves space travel and alien adventures made it more relatable—plus, hearing that Sally is a big Star Trek fan too also helps make her personally more relatable and allows her to call out elements that seem too much like “plot points in a film” in the scenarios that happen to her on the spaceship. That was a really nice touch.

All in all, this is a fast-paced, wild space adventure with diverse characters, humour, and just the right amount of action.

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