Motherless Oven is one of those wild, bursting-with-imagination stories. Davis crafts a world that we'll never be able to expect or entirely grok the rules for. It's funny and turbulent and only ever hints at what it is itself all about. And I liked it for that. It's a world where children, whose origins remain veiled, build and maintain their own parents, know the day of their deaths, and can change the season with an ill-advised flick of a switch.

The book traffics in absurdity but ties it together with a strange sort of ruleset (known wholly by Rob Davis alone, if even him). This book was my jam and jelly in 2014.

There is a sequel called the Can-Opener's Daughter, featuring Vera Pike, the blonde in the attached pictures—who is the daughter of a can-opener. It explains a ton of the whys and wherefores that haunt The Motherless Oven.

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