Manga Review – Clover by CLAMP (3/5 stars)

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Graphic Novel/Science Fiction/Shojo
Length: 512 pages
Publisher: Dark Horse Books
Release Date: May 13, 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1595821966
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: Borrowed from Library
Rating: 3/5 stars

“Kazuhiko is a young, but already deeply wounded black ops agent of a baroque, retro-tech future – pulled out of retirement to escort Sue, a mysterious waif, to a destination she alone knows. Sue and Kazuhiko have never met, yet she knows him, having grown up since the age of four with her only human contact, two distant voices: that of her elderly “grandma,” General Ko, and of Kazuhiko’s dead girlfriend, Ora. And Sue has been kept in that cage all these years because of what she is, and what the Clover Leaf Project found her to be – a military top secret, and the most dangerous person in the world!”

I picked this up at the library because of the cool cover and I liked the fact that all the volumes are in one large omnibus. This ended up being very different from any other manga I have read but I didn’t really like how ambiguous and incomplete it felt.

Some of the illustration in here is truly beautiful and amazing. However, it’s also a bit scattered and hard to follow. At times this felt more like random pieces of art than an actual story.

It was an interesting and different read but I didn’t enjoy it all that much. I liked the retro-tech setting but the characters were all a bit odd and creepy feeling. I also had trouble engaging in the story; it just felt really disjointed.

The ending was really abrupt, less of an ending and more of a “well I guess we’re done now”.

Overall this was okay but not really for me. I liked the setting and some of the beautiful illustrations but thought the story was awkward and disjointed and never really engaged with the characters. When I finished this I was like “eh, okay that was weird…moving on…”