by Alison L. Roberts

Despite the fact she's an orphan, Yui leads the life of an average junior high student. She lives with her grandmother, who does maternal things like chastise her for sloppiness and manners. She falls asleep during class. She has several close friends.

Yui is the kind of girl with whom people fall in love. And she is the unknowing product of a unique heritage that she is only beginning to discover.

In Vampire Yui, Vol. 1: A New Awakening, artist and author Narumi Kakinouchi revisits the gothic world portrayed in her original Vampire Princess Miyu manga — this time viewing it through the eyes of a teenager who is just coming to the realization that she is not quite as normal as she once thought she was.

A long illness, accompanied by strange dreams and nighttime visitors already familiar to Kakinouchi fans, brings the long-hidden secret of Yui's half- shinma/half-vampire lineage to the forefront, leaving the naïve heroine of this series at a loss.

What should she do with her newfound knowledge and abilities? Can she trust Nagi, the one individual who knows her secret? Is this mysterious young man who he seems to be. . . or is he something entirely different?

Miyu is, first and foremost, an otherworldly being, but her younger, literary sibling is, in many ways, still painfully human. Yui's difficulty with acknowledging her immortality and her reluctance to let go of her humanity, despite the heartbreak, make the first graphic novel in the Vampire Yui series an elegantly-realized and angsty addition Kakinouchi's existing vampire mythology.