Solitaire by Kelley Eskridge is amazing… really, no other way to describe it. Where Amazing means : surprising greatly or inspiring awe or admiration or wonder. Seriously.
First, the coolness of the covers.
solitaire kelley eskridge cover 2solitaire kelley eskridge cover 1

A summary from Kelley’s website,

Jackal Segura is a Hope: born special and raised to a life of responsibility and privilege as a powerful symbol of a fledgling world government; destined for greatness. In a few months she will take up her role in the global administration, sponsored by the massive corporate entity that houses, feeds, employs and protects her and everyone she loves. And she’s just discovered that everything she believes, everything she is, is a lie.

Then in a few short moments of horror and catastrophe, Jackal is a Hope no longer. She has become a pariah and a murderer, a person with no community, no future, disconnected from the world. She enters an experimental program designed to inflict the experience of years of solitary confinement in a few short months—virtual confinement in a sealed cell within her own mind, grief-stricken and alone, until the day her demons come out to play.

Then she’s back in a world she no longer knows, branded and despised, struggling to make her way in a strange country. Now she has a chance to rediscover her life, her love and her soul—in a strange place of shattered hopes and new beginnings, called Solitaire.

Genevieve Williams reviews Solitaire at Strange Horizons.com,

What is the nature of identity? Is it inherent to each person, making each of us so unique and distinctive that, even if the outside world were entirely stripped away, the individual would exist unchanged? Or are we created by our environment: our circumstances, challenges, and relationships with others?
Solitaire cover

It’s an age-old question, one addressed in science and philosophy as well as in fiction. With her first novel, Solitaire, Kelley Eskridge tosses her hat into this particular ring with elegance and grace. A previous Nebula and James Tiptree finalist with her short fiction, Eskridge already had a good bit of buzz going; with Solitaire, the buzz may swell to a roar.

And from Kelley’s website, on what writing is,

Writing is connection. If a work of mine can resonate with a reader, then for that moment we are connected across time and space and experience. It means that I’ve sat in my room and traveled some piece of that internal landscape, and brought it back and said to the reader Do you see? And years later, in another place, she has read it and thought, Yes, I see. How amazing is that?

So go check it out. It is an older title so you might have to special order it, but it is WORTH the wait!

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