The Can Opener’s Daughter

In The Motherless Oven, Davis crafted a wholly original world with surrealist and satirical flourishes, in which storms of knives fall from the sky, children build their own inanimate object parents, and everyone knows the day of their death. In this follow-up, the middle book of a trilogy, Davis expands this world by revealing the backstory of his mysterious schoolgirl heroine Vera Pike, focusing on her relationship with her parents, most notably her weather-clock mother. Davis also picks up the cliff-hanger from the first book as Vera and her friend, Castro, help the protagonist of the previous book, Scarper, to survive his death day. Davis has crafted a universe totally lacking in derivative concepts or even references that the reader can cling to. The dialogue is filled with philosophical ideas and pull quotes of crafty wisdom, and the scrappy black-and-white art offers frenetic action within an absurd reality that leaves other dystopian fictions in the dust. (Feb.)