Product Description

Kieli is a reclusive girl isolated by her ability to see ghosts. Her only friend is her "roommate," Becca, the precocious spirit of a former student still residing in Kieli's dorm. Everything in Kieli's life changes suddenly when the girls meet the handsome but distant Harvey who, like Kieli, can see ghosts. He also turns out to be one of the legendary Undying, an immortal soldier bred for war now being hunted by the Church. When Kieli joins Harvey on a pilgrimage to lay to rest the spirit of a corporal possessing an old radio, as unlikely as it seems, she feels she may have finally found a place where she belongs in the world. And in Kieli, Harvey may have found a reason to live again.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #918573 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780759529298
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Yukako Kabei

Customer Reviews

Fantastic novel.
Many of the previous reviews are for the manga version of this series. I highly recommend the manga as well, as it is a faithful reproduction of this novel and has great artwork.

As for the novel:

As the summary states: Kieli is a young, orphaned girl with the ability to see ghosts. This has made her a bit of a social outcast at her school. Then one day she runs into Harvey, another young man with the same ability, and the Corporal, a ghost who has possessed an old beat-up radio. This is the first time she's ever met anyone else who can see the things she does, so she ends up following them, curious and longing for answers.

The novel itself is a quick but very enjoyable read. The characters are very interesting and complex. The short length of the book limits too much character development, but there really is a good amount of it here for a light novel. The description is vivid and it was incredibly easy for me to fall into the world of Kieli and "see" what was happening. But what was most surprising to me were the occasionally deep comments scattered throughout the story. Despite her young age, Kieli is disillusioned by what she alone has been able to see, and she has a rather jaded view of the hypocrisy of the religious society she lives in. The bond that forms between Kieli and Harvey is unlikely and yet stronger because of it, as they both offer each other something that they'd never really had before. It's a great story that I really couldn't help but get immersed in, and I couldn't put down the book until I'd finished. Now I can't wait for the next volume to be released!

The book itself is nice production-wise. There are some beautiful color pages, one for each chapter title page, at the front. Interspersed throughout the book are illustrations, as is customary for light novels.

I highly recommend this for anyone who enjoys steam-punk, sci-fi, or really anyone who enjoys good stories with interesting characters.

She sees dead people...and zombies
Kieli is sort of a manga mashup of the sixth sense meets xxxholic.

With out going too much into the story I'll give a quick summary. There was a great world war 80 years ago. The war depleated all of the natural resources on the planet (not explicitly earth), and the leaders of the countries were running out of soldiers, so they created new ones with the recycled old ones (called here, the undead...basically zombies). The undead could not be killed (thus the reasoning for undead...). The only way to kill them is pulling out their hearts. After the war, the leaders of the church executed all of them...

Back to the story...some years pass on, Kieli is found at a boarding school, she meets a friend, who turns out to be a ghost. Come to find out, Kieli can see dead people, then she runs into another person who can see dead people too, and who happens to be an "undead", carring a radio.

The story gets more interesting from there. Its your typical shojo affair, but not so typical story line. It is also much more violent (severed body parts, blood soaked clowns..etc). The art is a little gothic that reminds me of xxxholic, (the seeing ghosts things and the inability to separate the dead from the living does remind me of Watanuki). For some reason, the undead man (harvey), the radio and Kieli begins on what is going to be a long journey (that reminds me of Dazzle...another good manga).

The language can get harsh, and its a little violent, but it does not distract from engrossing storytelling. The artwork is well detailed and awesome, one of the "hidden gems" of the manga section.

Uses the horrors and abuses of war to enshrine the complexities and nobilities of the human spirit
Eighty years ago, a brutal war over natural resources led to the creation of the Undying, a corporation of reanimated corpses robbed from the battlefield and given a "core" that makes them immortal and virtually indestructible. Now, though, is a time of peace, and the church has been hunting down and exterminating the last of these so-called "Demons of War." The orphan girl Kieli saw this happen with her own eyes when she was a child.

But that is not the only wonder--or horror--that she has seen. She can also see spirits. Kieli's classmates ostracize her for her strange behavior, and her only friend is the restless ghost of Becca, a girl hit and killed by a train. Becca's mischief, in turn, gets Kieli involved in the life of Harvey, one of the last remaining Undying, who, like herself, can also see spirits. Harvey carries with him a radio possessed by the ghost of a Lance Corporal that he killed during the war, and Kieli accompanies them both to the site of that last battle, ostensibly to put the Corporal's spirit to rest for good. Needless to say, they do not go unmolested in their travels.

The two volumes of Kieli are adapted by Shiori Teshirogi from selected segments of a longer novel series by Yukako Kabei. They feel less like a tale with a distinct beginning, middle, and end than an episodic, somewhat repetitive sequence of events that is, at best, just a prologue. Really, though, Kieli's larger objective is not a gripping action-adventure so much as it is a melodramatic exploration of the depth of the profound emotional attachments people develop for each other. In this manner, it is the best of both the worlds of prose and sequential art: The story achieves novelistic complexity of sentiment, while the artwork is simply top-notch.

Early on in the series, you learn that the Undying have no souls because their hearts were removed and replaced with machines. This concept does not translate well into English without an explanation that American publisher Yen Press does not provide: The Japanese word kokoro means both "heart" and "soul." If the theme of Kieli could be encapsulated by a single word, kokoro would be it. Kabei's narrative dives progressively deeper into the spiritual depths that motivate both Harvey and Kieli--the reasons why they both want to die and then, later on, the reasons they both want to live.

Teshirogi, for her part, has matched her artwork perfectly to this theme. Her panels are splendidly detailed in all particulars, capturing the horrors of warfare, the magnificence of the church cathedrals, and the hustle and bustle of small-town life with equal ease. Her characters are quite cute, almost moe, and should appeal to that readership demographic that likes the moe genre as well.

However, Kieli is most strikingly reminiscent of Makoto Shinkai's Voices of a Distant Star, and like that contemporary classic of animation, it uses the horrors and abuses of war to enshrine the complexities and nobilities of the human spirit.

-- Casey Brienza