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""The place where a part connects is specially prepared with a housing, a thread or a flange. One true surface against another. It’s not possible for the parts of the body to fit together like this. There’s skin and there’s the flesh under it. The flesh, the meat of the body, isn’t stable. There are three lines cut into the middle of father man’s belt.

 

Droplets on a leaf, Geilston Bay. August 2021.

Exploded View by Carrie Tiffany

Hmmm. Perhaps the fact that cars are quite possibly the least interesting things that I can imagine explains my coolness to this one. It's a bleak and sombre book, but I never quite believed it. The novel progresses through what is essentially one unbroken stream of consciousness from the mind of a young girl.

Our narrator - dealing with significant neglect and abuse - struck me as too uneven to fully accept as authentic. This may well be due to her use of a Holden car manual to process her trauma. Still, there is an incongruity to her singular prescience, acumen and utter lack of agency that struck me as unconvincing.

There is an implausibility to the car journey that serves as the centre point of the story, which is not helped by the feeling that the author gave up on it a third of the way through. I found the entire thing uneven and frustrating, which is disappointing as there are moments of great writing.

⭐ ⭐ 1/2

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