In Girls Love of the Dead, Shi ga Futari wo Waka..tanai? we met Mitsuki, a young woman mourning the death of the girl she loves. In her attempt to leave her own life behind, she stumbles across a school for zombies, at which she finds her dearly departed Rin.

About 2 weeks after I reviewed Volume 1 of this phone novel, Manga Planet announced the license of several of the Yomuco/Parsola “super light” Yuri novels. I was – and am – delighted that they are giving releases to works like Between Two Guns, Lovely! along with Shodensha titles like It’s Personnel!, by leading some of the luminaries in Yuri right now. (In fact, subscribing to Manga Planet is next on my list. I just am so behind on reading that I haven’t had time. I’ll add it to our microgoals on Okazu.) When Manga Planet announced a new license – I can’t remember which one, I jokingly tweeted at them that they should license Girls Love of the Dead.

And so they have.

Yes, you will be able to read this delightfully screwy zombie Yuri love story in April! Ahh! So of course I wanted to get a jump on the story and catch up on the volumes I’ve bought on Global Bookwalker.

Which brings us to Girls Love of the Dead, Kioku no Kakera, Volume 2 (ガールズラブ・オブ・ザ・デッド〈記憶のかけら〉). Mitsuki has committed herself to attending school on her summer break. Zombie school, that is. Every night, she makes herself up as a zombie. She joins Rin’s class and proceeds to try to get Rin to remember her. Rin, who has no memory of her life, doesn’t remember Mitsuki. Mitsuki figures that, as Rin is dead, she’s got all the time in the world to achieve her goal.

Their homeroom teacher throws some cold water on this, when she explains that zombies only have a limited unlife span. After a while, Rin will not just not remember her life, she’ll move on entirely! Now Mitsuki has a deadline, oh no! We’re also presented with a bit of a mystery….how did Rin die? It seems unlikely in the extreme that she died the way they said she died, at the very least.

This series is a slightly goofy, but there are so many fun touches I can’t really single one out. Hoshii Nanao’s story movies quickly – it’s designed to be read on a cellphone, after all – and the illustrations by Morishima Akiko are charming and colorful, not at all what one might expect from a zombie story. I find it all loopy and fun (just finished Volume 3 last night, in fact!) and will happily look forward to it in English next month.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – 7 Still goofy, but getting intriguing
Characters – 8 Some intriguing stuff is on the horizon for this, too
Service – 2 A little bathing suit service
Yuri – 7 Mitsuki’s love is true. ^_^

Overall – 8

Menou is an Executioner. Her job is to find and kill the people who come to her world from somewhere else, the Lost Ones. They have to die, not because they are bad people, but because their abilities cause untold disaster. After surviving one such disaster, without memories, her home literally erased from the world, Menou trained with a legendary Executioner. Now she is striving to become the best, to protect her world…to kill the most people. So when Menou takes on the task to kill Akari, a Lost One with the ability to manipulate time, Menou knows she’ll do whatever she has to to accomplish her task.

The Executioner and Her Way of Life, Vol. 1: Thus She is Reborn by Mato Sato, has some very good qualities and some not-so-good qualities. But as the days pass and I found myself thinking about what to say in this review, more that comes to mind is good. That said, this book gets off to a rough start. Being a light novel, the writing often focuses on the wrong things for too long, leaving out key elements that weren’t breasts or stupid clothing. Translator Jenny McKeon does decent work with writing that clearly needed an editor on the Japanese side. This novel will be available in print and digital on March 9 from Yen Press and generally speaking, I think it was more good than bad.

On the good side – and deeply unusual for a light novel – this is some of the most detailed world-building I’ve seen in an not-quite-Medieval Europe-esque fantasy light novel series, which makes it much more original than most. The magic theory in this book is also really solid. I quite like the Pure Concepts and the spellcasting here. Like the magic/science of the Locked Tomb series, the magical theory bore up under scrutiny.Characters here are interesting enough, especially when their backstories are filled in and possible future plot complications are implied. Honestly, had both the art by nilitsu and the story not highlighted breasts as often, I might have actually enjoyed the characters, but the infantile male gaze of the writer and artist was really hard to get past. (Please do not waste your time trying to shame me about this opinion. Both the fetish and people who scream at me about it fail to be entertaining.)

The big reveal on the bad guy was super obvious. Maybe it is supposed to be to us, I certainly hope so. But that heavy-handed foreshadowing, combined with the endless prattle about breast size and clothing that shows hard nipples because apparently if you cannot actually see that they have nipples, they aren’t there, makes me think the intended audience here are no older than 12 or so, something I find difficult to believe was worth an award, even at GA Bunko.  Nonetheless, even centering an extremely infantile male gaze in a story about mostly female characters, this wasn’t a bad book. The one insurmountably negative thing was that the world had no joy at all in it. I’m getting tired of grimdark and this is absolutely a grimdark for the sake of itself book, as the creator writes in the authors note. No one, even people living lives of desperation have no joy or art. The poorest people still sing songs, people living in despair still create art. It’s hard to believe any world in which there is not the slightest hint of happiness, even if you bake that into the story. I just don’t buy it.

The Yuri is…a supporting character, I guess I’d call it. The Yuri is not irrelevant to the story, but this isn’t a romance, and it is pretty obvious where the various affections might end up leading the characters in the next volume. If the author has the chops to carry it off, it could be really good. I can think of a handful of places the current set-up can go, and I’m not even accounting for future characters being introduced.  Its really going to come down to the writing which, on occasion, shows promise.

Ratings:

Art – Blleeeeeccccchhhhhhh
Story – On the magic alone I’d give it a 9, but let’s temper it to an 8 for the grim
Characters – This one is hard. They start about 4, but by the end I’d go for an 8
Service – See art. Yes, I get it, it’s all very exciting that women have tits. /eyeroll/
Yuri – Yes and then Yes! and yes again, and we’ll see.

Overall – 8

If you enjoyed ROLL OVER AND DIE: I Will Fight With My Love and My Cursed Sword, I definitely think you will also enjoy Executioner, at the very least. If you thought ROLL OVER AND DIE was too gross for you, and/or had not nearly enough worldbuilding, then you might want to give this series a try; it’s less gross and better built.

And, for those of you already into the series, an anime is on the way. A trailer is up, which mostly features face close-ups of the novel art for Shokei Shoujo no Ikiru Michi (Virgin Road) 「処刑少女の生きる道（バージンロード）」

Many thanks to Yen for the review copy. It was an interesting read.

When I was in high school, I had a teacher who would walk up and down the rows of desks in the classroom while we were in his class. If he thought we were not paying sufficient attention, he would slam a pointer down on our desks to startle us. Reading ROLL OVER AND DIE: I Will Fight With My Love and My Cursed Sword, Volume 2 was exactly like his trigonometry class – overstimulating and understimulating at the same time.

We left Hero Flum Apricot and her companion Milkit at the end of Volume 1 safe in the Western District with a former colleague in her hero party, Eterna, the mage. Eterna had left and, we know that so have several other party members, leaving the so-called “genius” leader Jean close to being on his own. As a hero, Flum is constantly fighting off the utterly tiresome Dein, a boring, gloaty and exhausting guy who spends literally every moment of his life trying to make Flum miserable. This will not end well for him. But we’re going to have to listen to a lot of “gyahahah” style gloating, and “hernh-hernh” type threats of sexual violence first. /deep sigh/

In the meantime, Flum will be fighting off accursed eyeballs and other grotesqueries, and we will learn more about what a total scam the Church is and how humans are evil. On the positive side, all of this will be done at such breakneck speed that we don’t really linger too long in threatening situations. On the negative side, some of the dialogue here is reminiscent of Tantric Stripfighter Trina. Characters that say “I should tell you now that I’m far superior to a normal human.” unironically not as a joke is, in my opinion, not-great writing.

Once again on the positive side, this book definitely saves innocent lives, as opposed to sacrificing them, and violence against girls is usually in the past while the present is filled with affirming their right to thrive. Flum is definitely the center of all the decent and good people of the story, who are slowly, surely drawing in around her to what will undoubtedly be a final climax that is full of scuzzy boring gloaty bad guys, organs and blood. as we remake society.

There are at least two other books in this series. I honestly do not know if I can bring myself to read them. We’ll see. But if you are enjoying this series, rock on. You have at least two more books to go and a manga adaptation is on the way.

I idly wondered what the original name of this series was, as I expected “ROLL OVER AND DIE: I Will Fight With My Love and My Cursed Sword” was not it. It was, as I suspected, not it.  “Omaegoto toki ga Maoh ni Kateru to Omouna” to Yuusha Party wo Tsuihousareta no de, Outo de Kimama ni Kurashitai,「お前ごときが魔王に勝てると思うな」と勇者パーティを追放されたので、王都で気ままに暮らしたい, which I’m not saying is untranslatable or anything but does make it tough for a title: (Since I was told, )”I don’t think you you can beat the Demon Chief” and was thrown out of the hero party, I want to live freely in the Royal Capital or something like that.

Ratings:

Art – 6 Okay. Not horrific, just sort of shocked faces and blood and torn clothes.
Story – 6 Rushed, crowded and often lazy, but if you like it, you like it
Characters – 7 No real growth, but they are okay as characters to start
Service – 5 Still lots of gross and dressing and undressing.
Yuri – 4  Last volume I said “but no doubt it will climb”…I was wrong. Milkit and Flum are in outright denial, even as others are like, “Look, its obvious.”

Overall – 7

Try to avoid having every single bad guy in your story being gloaty AND boring. I’m not in this book, but was still begging for death at times.

The team at Seven Seas did a fine job, but this book is just all right, no matter how well it has been handled.