The Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko is the sequel to The Night Watch that I read earlier this year. Like the other, it's three stories in one book and is the story of the struggle between the Light and the Dark in Moscow. This time the focus is on the Dark Others.
That's sort of the problem with this book. It's hard to have empathy for characters that you know are evil. This is most evident in the first story. The witch Alisa appeared in the The Night Watch as a villian. Telling the story from her perspective and trying to be drawn into her story was a little more difficult because she just wasn't a nice person. I didn't want her to have what she wanted because I didn't like the way she went about getting it. I got the feeling that Lukyaneko was going for a kind of Romeo and Juliet tale with the first story. A Dark Other falls hopelessly in love with a Light Other and it ends badly for all involved. Except it didn't quite make it there.
There was more success in the next two stories. The characters were more empathetic as they weren't really EVIL, but they were selfish. The characters were drawn such that I could see their motivations for what they chose to do, or to not do.
I'm looking forward to the third in the series as this one had movement to a final chapter. There's definately some kind of climax building that will change this world. Even the title of the final book, The Twilight Watch, signals something different because that's something that hasn't been introduced before. I'm going to give this one a 4. It was better than OK and it did make me want to keep reading.
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