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A review by saidtheraina
The Motherless Oven by Rob Davis
4.0
Honestly, I kinda don't know where to start.
It follows the adventures of a pretty unlikeable kid in a british place with school uniforms. People create their own "parents" - they're machines. The sky rains knives as a matter of course. TV is replaced with watching "the wheel," which is vaguely kaleidoscopic. Houses have various kinds of "gods," which have functions. The police are elderly people riding around in carriages.
This kid's dad disappears, and he and a couple other kids go on the run to look for him.
The world looks pretty much like ours, although some of the machine/robots & gods look... out of place. But the way that things are structured is very very different. And sometimes words mean different things than they do in our world. And there's also some britishisms thrown in, which do nothing to clarify anything.
I don't think I've ever read anything like it.
And yes, it's confusing, and hard to explain, and not easy to follow.
But, flipping back through it, I feel nothing but admiration. The illustrations are very accessible and lovely. The creatures are downright cool looking.
It reads like one fucked-up dream.
But I think I liked it.
Kind of a lot.
It follows the adventures of a pretty unlikeable kid in a british place with school uniforms. People create their own "parents" - they're machines. The sky rains knives as a matter of course. TV is replaced with watching "the wheel," which is vaguely kaleidoscopic. Houses have various kinds of "gods," which have functions. The police are elderly people riding around in carriages.
This kid's dad disappears, and he and a couple other kids go on the run to look for him.
The world looks pretty much like ours, although some of the machine/robots & gods look... out of place. But the way that things are structured is very very different. And sometimes words mean different things than they do in our world. And there's also some britishisms thrown in, which do nothing to clarify anything.
I don't think I've ever read anything like it.
And yes, it's confusing, and hard to explain, and not easy to follow.
But, flipping back through it, I feel nothing but admiration. The illustrations are very accessible and lovely. The creatures are downright cool looking.
It reads like one fucked-up dream.
But I think I liked it.
Kind of a lot.