Target: Sergei Lukyanenko’s Day Watch. Translated by Andrew Bromfield (The Watches pentalogy #2)
Profile: Modern Fantasy, Suspense, Horror
Day Watch is a strong successor to the gritty, twilight world that Sergei Lukyanenko introduced us to in Night Watch. After exploring the moral dilemmas facing a ‘good’ person trying to maintain a status quo that is anything but good, Lukyanenko shifts his focus to take a look at the bad guys. That being said, Day Watch isn’t as strong overall as its prequel, partly because the Dark Others aren’t faced with the same quandaries as the Light. Lukyanenko’s strengths lie in those internal debates and without them the stories have less weight.
Like Night Watch, Day Watch is composed of three separate but interconnected stories. The first deals with a recurring character from the first book, Alisa Donnikova, a mid-level witch with the Day Watch. Alisa is sent to a summer camp to recover her powers after a strenuous conflict with the Night Watch. There, without her powers, she starts to fall in love with a human, putting strain on her identity as a callous Dark Other. The second story shifts to an unknown Dark Magician named Vitaly Rogoza. He has no memory of his past, but is rapidly awakening to tremendous dark power and a purpose he doesn’t understand. The final story takes us back to Anton, the Night Watchman from the first book, and his counterpart in the Day Watch, a wizard named Edgar, as they travel to Prague to face a tribunal of the Inquisition.
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