Is Clover (CLAMP) Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Clover is set in a near-future where the government tracks and controls "Clovers," people born with psychic abilities ranked by how many leaves they're assigned. Sue is the only Four-Leaf Clover ever found, the most powerful of them all, and she's spent her life isolated because of it. Kazuhiko, a retired soldier pulled back into service, is assigned to escort her to a place called Fairy Park — her one stated wish. What starts as a simple transport job turns into something more complicated, tangled up with Kazuhiko's own past and a woman he loved and lost. CLAMP tells this across four slim volumes, jumping between characters and timeframes rather than moving in a straight line.

What it does well

The art is the first thing anyone mentions about Clover, and for good reason. CLAMP is known for dense, ornate linework, but here they strip almost everything away — huge fields of black and white, panels built around empty space, silhouettes doing the emotional work that dialogue would handle elsewhere. It's a genuinely different look from the rest of their catalog, and it suits the story's quiet, melancholy register.

That restraint carries into the central relationship, too. Kazuhiko and Sue don't talk much, and the manga doesn't rush to explain their connection in dialogue — it's built through small gestures, glances, and the slow erosion of Kazuhiko's professional distance. Readers who like a romance that trusts them to read the room will find a lot to like here. The nonlinear structure helps rather than hurts in this respect: seeing fragments of Kazuhiko's past life alongside his present mission gives the short page count more emotional weight than a straightforward telling would.

Where it falls short

The same minimalism that makes the art striking makes the plot genuinely hard to follow at times. Chapters are short, time-skips happen without much signposting, and side characters like Ran and Gingetsu get introduced with barely enough space to register before the story moves on. If you're not paying close attention, it's easy to lose track of who's who and what just happened.

The bigger issue is the ending. CLAMP has acknowledged that Clover was originally meant to run longer before its magazine folded, and the published version reads like a story that had to find its landing early. The central Kazuhiko/Sue thread does resolve emotionally, but a lot of the worldbuilding around the Clover program itself, and the fates of the supporting cast, is left hanging. Some readers find that openness haunting; others find it just unfinished.

Verdict

Clover is a short, visually striking detour in CLAMP's catalog — the kind of thing you read in an afternoon and think about for longer than that. The art and the central romance earn the recommendation on their own. Just go in knowing the story was cut shorter than CLAMP intended, and that "open ending" here sometimes just means "unresolved."