- An unnamed girl’s reflections are the essence of this book: some are wise, some cruel, some naive, some nasty, some funny. ‘Nobody beautiful has ever caught a bus’.
- Her mother's new partner, ‘father man’, is brutish and unlovable, a miserable turd. He runs an unlicensed car repair business in their garage. After dinner one night, in a flash of anger, he suddenly and without reason cuts off her pony tale. But most importantly he sexually abuses her at night.
- Her revenge is sabotage. Under cover of darkness she enters the garage and loosens screws, bites into hoses, pours sand into engine parts, etc.
- She knows exactly what she's doing. She obsessively devours a car mechanic manual containing diagrams of engine parts - the 'exploded views' of the title.
- Tiffany brilliantly captures the deadness of the vast Australian outback and the experience of driving through it for days on end. The family of four cramped in their Holden for eight days, then a lousy three days in a friend's house on the coast, then eight days back again. They sleep in the car. It's absurd. It’s true horror. I was reminded of Shaun Prescott's creepy 'The Town'. Each town is every other ugly town. ‘It’s a fucking nightmare’ father man says. The spare, empty landscape; the empty roads; the life-denying ‘holiday’ of a family stuck day and night in a car without even the semblance of civilised living. There’s a morbid, suffocating vacuity eviscerating any real life, even insect life. ‘The nothing in the outback is thick and rich’.
- But this novel is fully alive. The prose - the young teen's voice - is spare yet frequently poetic. It's beautifully done.
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