A review by tagrace
Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

4.0

Terry Pratchett has been one of my favorite authors for more than a decade now, but somehow I had skipped The Nights Watch until this year. It feels very much like classic Discworld: Vimes thrown back in his element, as a magical storm returns him to the beginning of his career. Like a lot of the Discworld books, there's ample commentary about society and cities without ever being too browbeating. The only reason that I would give it four rather than five stars is that the book feels much like Vimes in the narrative: a victim of its own success. Vimes is one of the most popular Discworld characters and in the series saw a meteoric rise from captain to duke. He's stopped foreign wars and arrested the Patrician himself. The book in some ways is an attempt to reset Vimes after such success and take him back to his roots. But in that sense the plot feels less like a natural extension of the Discworld narrative and more like a literary experiment by Terry Pratchett. The whole conceit of the book never seems to go anywhere, and as much as I enjoyed seeing Vimes back in his element I finished the book wondering if anything in Discworld had really been changed by this addition.