Review: THE DAY WATCH

The Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
Book 2 of The Night Watch series
Read by Paul Michael
Genre: urban fantasy
Format: paperback & audiobook

About The Day Watch:

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.

Source: Info in the About The Day Watch was taken from GoodReads at http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104160.Day_Watch on 28/05/2013.

Review:

Like Book 1, this book is a slow start too. Unfortunately, so is a few characters' tendencies to be too stupid to live (TSTL)! That, I did not appreciate! However the world building remains beautiful as ever! Similarly to Book 1, this book did not pick up until the very end. I don't know whether the goodness of Sergei Lukyanenko's story telling quality did not translate well into English thus it got lost in translation. Or I simply do not appreciate his story telling abilities in this particular book. Either way, I find the book dragging at times. But the beautiful world of Anton Gorodetsky and my incurable curiosity as to what happens next made me continue reading until the end.

If I break down this book into it's constituent parts, it garners a score of less than three. However if I look at it as a whole, it feels like a 4. So I will give it a four in contradiction to my Empirical Evaluation. It seems like that the adage:

"the whole is more than the sum of its parts"

fits this book well.

Empirical Evaluation:
Story telling quality = 2
Character development = 3
Story itself = 1.5
Ending = 3
World building = 5
Cover art = 2
Pace = paperback: 1 (audiobook: 14 hrs and 25 mins listening time)
Plot = 1.5
Narrator = 4

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 cherries


Books In The The Night Watch series:


Thank you to Arrow for the review copy received.

FTC Disclosure:
The paperback book was received for free from Arrow. The audiobook copy was purchased with private funds. No money received for this review.