Kira Solomon has the ability to know everything about the past of anything she touches, and works for the Gilead Commission, an organization devoted to maintaining the balance between Light (good supernatural beings) and Shadow (bad supernatural beings). When her mentor is murdered, she’s left with a 4000-year-old dagger that multiple parties are ( Read more... )

Yeine Darr’s mother was once the heiress to Sky, the most powerful kingdom in the world, but she left (and was subsequently disowned) to marry the ruler of an obscure barbarian kingdom. But now Yeine’s mother is dead, and her grandfather has summoned her to Sky as one of three potential heirs. Of mixed race in a rather elite society, Yeine is an ( Read more... )

This light novel, loosely based on several of the first few arcs of the manga, has a rather irritating translation ( Read more... )

A little over 60 pages of this is fragments of the personal writings of Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji*. The other 70 or so pages are graphs, illustrations, and extremely detailed cultural and historical notes by Richard Bowring. Bowring clearly loves Japan’s Heian period, and infuses his notes with it.

Murasaki’s “diary” entries (it ( Read more... )

This is an amazingly frustrating story told in an extremely charming way ( Read more... )

This is the first in a series of Japanese light novels about feudal fantasy economics ( Read more... )

Set during China’s cultural revolution in the 1970s, this semi-autobiographical book is about two young men exiled to the mountains for “re-education” due to their parents being considered enemies of the state. There, they discover a hidden stash of western classics, and both fall for a pretty seamstress who lives nearby ( Read more... )

Patty Ho is a half-Taiwanese/half-white teenager who lives in an almost all-white community. Her father ran off when she was two, and her mother is almost obsessively restrictive, and is adamant that Patty can’t attend and dances and can’t date until after high school. And when she does date, it can only be a Taiwanese boy. But then a fortuneteller ( Read more... )

The two volumes of Missin’ are actually three novellas. The first, “Little Shop Called End of the World,” is about a freelance journalist who quits writing to open a shop selling Vivienne Westwood merchandise who enters a strange relationship with a silent loli who frequents the shop. Like with Kamikaze Girls, one of favorite books from last year, ( Read more... )