By Joan de la Haye

Available on all ereaders now

Joanna Parypinski’s world continues to be upturned as she learns some hard truths about her new life…

Joan de la Haye’s new sequence of stories that began in The Race continues with this rather different tale – different both compared with its predecessor, and with the author’s own previous work. As her recent collection of short stories Sliced and Diced amply demonstrates, de la Haye’s forte has been in rapidly creating a world and inflicting some horror upon it, and her other novellas have shown this aptitude for drawing the reader in. Here, she avoids the sex (and even to a large extent, the violence) that has characterised her work – bar one incredible simile that had me choking the first time I read it – and instead concentrates on worldbuilding.

Training Days isn’t a standalone story, by any means: you can come into it without having read The Race, but I suspect there are few people who won’t invest the 99p (or local equivalent) to do so. The story follows Joanna in the aftermath of her Hunger Games-esque victory, delving beneath the surface of those who are now manipulating her, throwing some very interesting ideas into the mix and building a cast of characters who we’ll hopefully follow for some time to come. There’s an ever-present menace that doesn’t just threaten Joanna, and she, and the reader, realises that events aren’t just outside her control, they’re beyond those in whose power she is too. We may not have extended scenes of physical battle… but the mental ones are just as potentially lethal.

I suspect de la Haye is following a pattern established by a number of authors in recent times, releasing chunks of the story, and then making the whole of The Race available as a standalone book. It’s a challenge to make each part resonate sufficiently to keep the reader interested, and I hope we will soon find out the consequences of the decisions made in this section.

Verdict: A change of pace from The Race allows Joan de la Haye to demonstrate her aptitude for worldbuilding. 8/10

Paul Simpson