
Is Cleanness Worth Reading?
Ada’s Score
Garth Greenwell's Cleanness follows an American teacher living in Sofia, Bulgaria, navigating desire, shame, and intimacy through a series of interlocking encounters. The novel unfolds in luminous, sentence-level prose that owes as much to poetry as to fiction, rendering queer longing with extraordinary precision. Greenwell explores how power, vulnerability, and beauty coexist in relationships that refuse easy categorization. It is a book about the body as a site of both wound and grace.
“Greenwell writes sentences you want to read aloud. Aching, precise, and utterly fearless about desire.”
Ada Brief
AI reading intelligence“Greenwell writes sentences you want to read aloud. Aching, precise, and utterly fearless about desire.”
Book Details
- Publisher
- Macmillan Audio
- Published
- January 1, 2020
- Pages
- 240
- Language
- English
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Affiliate linksISBN: 9781250785664
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Ada’s Score Breakdown
4.4
This breakdown reflects how Ada weighs the book’s strengths and flaws, not aggregated reader data.
Common Questions About Cleanness
- Is Cleanness worth reading?
- Greenwell writes sentences you want to read aloud. Aching, precise, and utterly fearless about desire. Ada rates it 4.4 out of 5.
- How many pages is Cleanness?
- Cleanness is 240 pages long — around 4–5 hours at an average reading pace.




