The Day Watch - Rambling Readers

Published April 13, 2007 by William Heinemann.

ISBN:: 978-0-434-01443-9

(1 review)

The second book in the internationally bestselling fantasy series, Day Watch begins where Night Watch left off, set in a modern-day Moscow where the 1,000-year-old treaty between Light and Dark maintains its uneasy balance through careful vigilance from the Others. The forces of darkness keep an eye during the day, the Day Watch, while the agents of Light monitor the nighttime. Very senior Others called the Inquisitors are the impartial judges insisting on the essential compact. When a very potent artifact is stolen from them, the consequences are dire and drastic for all sides. Day Watch introduces the perspective of the Dark Ones, as it is told in part by a young witch who bolsters her evil power by leeching fear from children’s nightmares as a counselor at a girls’ summer camp. When she falls in love with a handsome young Light One, the balance is threatened and a death …

The second book in the internationally bestselling fantasy series, Day Watch begins where Night Watch left off, set in a modern-day Moscow where the 1,000-year-old treaty between Light and Dark maintains its uneasy balance through careful vigilance from the Others. The forces of darkness keep an eye during the day, the Day Watch, while the agents of Light monitor the nighttime. Very senior Others called the Inquisitors are the impartial judges insisting on the essential compact. When a very potent artifact is stolen from them, the consequences are dire and drastic for all sides. Day Watch introduces the perspective of the Dark Ones, as it is told in part by a young witch who bolsters her evil power by leeching fear from children’s nightmares as a counselor at a girls’ summer camp. When she falls in love with a handsome young Light One, the balance is threatened and a death must be avenged.Day Watch is replete with the thrilling action and intricate plotting of the first tale, fuelled by cunning, cruelty, violence, and magic. It is a fast paced, darkly humorous, haunting world that will take root in the shadows of your mind and live there forever.

11 editions

Arbieroo reviewed The Day Watch by Sergej Lukianenko

Review of 'The Day Watch' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Another three stories, following on from the events of The Night Watch, which had resolved matters quite nicely, thank you. (There was a time when this series would have been published as a nanology not a trilogy.) The Nightwatch had a somewhat unsettling habit of switching from the first person perspective of Anton, Nightwatch Agent, to a third person perspective whenever the author felt the need to describe events Anton was not witness to. The first story in the volume switches to a first person perspective of a character encountered briefly a number of times in the previous volume - and she is from the Day Watch. Other first person perspectives are used in the subsequent stories and again third person is used whenever the author feels like it. All this switching around is a little distracting and detracting....
The witch Alisa, protagonist of the first story in the present …

Another three stories, following on from the events of The Night Watch, which had resolved matters quite nicely, thank you. (There was a time when this series would have been published as a nanology not a trilogy.) The Nightwatch had a somewhat unsettling habit of switching from the first person perspective of Anton, Nightwatch Agent, to a third person perspective whenever the author felt the need to describe events Anton was not witness to. The first story in the volume switches to a first person perspective of a character encountered briefly a number of times in the previous volume - and she is from the Day Watch. Other first person perspectives are used in the subsequent stories and again third person is used whenever the author feels like it. All this switching around is a little distracting and detracting....
The witch Alisa, protagonist of the first story in the present volume is not a likable character (downright unpleasant, in my view) and I'm confident she is not meant to be. Yet at the denouement I found myself sympathising with her more than a little - that is quite some achievement on the part of Lukyenenko, who is, at his best, a very capable writer.
The middle story I found to be relatively weak, because the central character literally is not a character - Lukyenenko thereby defeating his own great strength of making his protagonists beleivable. The reasons behind this weird situation are explained, but still, the story is not what it perhaps could have been.
The final story sits perhaps between the other two in quality, this time because I felt that dragging Germanic and Christian mythology to the forefront of matters was a mistake. It somehow distracted from Lukyenenko's own imaginative creations.
Over-all this volume is weaker than the first and it is because it is more disjointed. The changes of perspective between characters leave you without the unifying influence that the use of Anton's first person view in all three parts of The Night Watch provided.