Solitaire by Kelley Eskridge

Solitaire by Kelley Eskridge

Eos (HarperCollins), 2002.

Overview: At the beginning of Solitaire, Ren “Jackal” Segura is preparing to take up her duties as one of the first citizens (or “Hopes”) of the world when she is wrongly convicted of a massive crime. She has a choice: forty years behind conventional bars, or ten months in virtual solitary confinement. The catch? Those ten months in real-time will feel like eight years in the virtual prison cell. Jackal has to marshal all of her skills and inner strength to survive the experimental technology, and then to re-acclimate to the world outside it.

My reaction: This was a great read. It almost made me cry twice, which doesn’t happen often for me with sci-fi! The idea that Jackal could be locked into a single environment in her mind for what felt like years was fascinating and terrifying to me, and I appreciated the fact that about a third of the book is given over to dealing with the consequences of it. My only quibble with it was the discovery—upon thinking about the whole story a little harder after I'd finished it—that there were some loose ends connected to her conviction. I don’t want to spoil anything, especially since I still enjoyed the actual heart of the book, which was Jackal’s imprisonment and rehabilitation, but if semi-major loose ends bug you into the end of next week, I’d skip this.