CLEAR has won many awards. They are what drew me to the book and may draw you in, too, even after you read what I thought of it. I wonder about the book reviewers of VOGUE, WASHINGTON POST, NPR, GUARDIAN, and GLOBE AND MAIL, who all called this Best Book of the Year, but maybe someone smarter than I am understood what I didn't.

The reviews of CLEAR that I read were misleading. They told me that John, a poor Scottish minister, went to an island to evict a man but became his friend. That's actually true. What led me wrong was what they DIDN'T say.

Now that I attempt to write about this book I see the difficulty. It's short, so it's easy to say too much and give away what Carys Davies meant for the reader to discover as they read.

I'll say this much more: John is a married man and quite poor. He is being paid to evict Ivar, the man living alone on the island. (I suggest you will understand this part of Scottish history better if you first look up "Scottish Clearances" on the Internet.) After John and Ivar become friends, John's wife, Mary, comes to get him.

Nothing much happens in this book before or after Mary appears. It bored me except, perhaps, the bit of Scottish history I learned when I looked it up on the Internet. I was never sure what I should think of what was happening. The end, especially, was ambiguous.

I won this book through goodreads.com.