New Watch

February 24, 2014
Lukyanenko’s fifth Night Watch novel (after 2008’s The Last Watch) featuring members of the Others, magical beings grouped into the Light Ones and the Dark Ones, succeeds in its playful approach to the supernatural thriller genre. The plot centers on the consequences of a chance meeting at the Moscow Airport, where Anton Gorodetsky, a Higher White Magician encounters a child, Innokentii Grigorievich Tolkov, who’s really a Prophet, a rare type of Other who can predict his own fate, and who is being stalked by a Twilight Creature known as a Tiger. While the stakes are unsurprisingly high, frequent injections of humor help separate this entry from the pack; at one point, characters discuss how the publication of the Harry Potter books has helped them convince young Others that they are not exactly human (“Children grasp the basic idea without even a blink now”).

March 15, 2014

In this dark urban fantasy series, two opposing forces of supernatural beings known as the Others--the Night Watch on the side of the Light and the Day Watch, who follow the Dark--keep an uneasy truce. Each side's purpose is to make sure the other Watch does not interfere with humans, swaying them to one side or the other. Series hero and high-level Light magician Anton Gorodetsky (from The Last Watch) discovers a young Other with the rare gift of prophecy, but powers that live in the Twilight will kill to ensure no Other is ever allowed to speak a prophecy aloud. VERDICT The simple dichotomy of Light versus Dark has a surprisingly large amount of ambiguity and nuance, as Anton struggles with the rules of his Watch and the protection of his family. This series deserves a larger U.S. audience, and now readers can catch up with their Russian comrades. [The film adaptation of the first volume of the series, Night Watch, became a box-office hit in Russia.--Ed.]

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2014
Originally published in Russia in 2012, this is the fifth and concluding volume of the Night Watch series, in which two groups of supernatural beings, the Night Watch and the Day Watch, protect the boundary between this world and the Twilight, a magical world beneath our own. When Anton Gorodetsky, a Light magician (and the series' nominal protagonist), chances upon a young boy petrified to get on a plane, convinced it will crash, he wonders if he's witness to something that could signal the very end of the Twilight itself. Readers unfamiliar with the preceding four books in the series can expect to play a game of catch-up here; familiarity with the earlier volumes is a necessity. Those who have been following the story since its beginning, on the other hand, will find this a satisfying and fitting wrap-up. It should be noted that, even though the Night Watch series has always been presented as a pentalogy, the author does leave room for at least one more book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)