Book Review: We Saw What You Started by Carla Salmon

Carla Salmon’s YA Aussie thriller We Saw What You Started takes readers on a journey of intrigue and inter-community surf life saving competitions, exposing the beating heart of Australia: club sports.

Otto is a fifteen-year-old from California who moved to Australia after a fire destroyed the farm he was living on with his mom. He finds himself the prime suspect for a series of fires in the town Red Sands – where he currently lives – by virtue of being at the scene of every fire.

Milly, an Australian who spends her summers with her dad in Red Sands, wants to win the surf life saving competition and prove to her dad that she would be a better club captain than her twin brother, Jasper. Also, she develops a crush on Otto.

Otto befriends Jasper, and gets closer to Milly, but slowly begins to suspect that someone near him could be the true arsonist. It becomes paramount that he clears his name so that he can protect himself and his friends from the mounting threat.

I, a teenage American immigrant to Australia who plays sport at a high level, read this book and didn’t know whether to laugh or feel insulted. The book’s representation of teenagers is so far removed from my experience and the experiences of my friends that I have to wonder if it results from some mass delusion – or whether we are the strange ones. The fact that a book written for and from the perspective of teenagers can so effectively alienate its target audience is somewhat concerning to me.

We Saw What You Started has a rudimentary understanding of teenagers that seems to originate from watching Mean Girls too often. I don’t believe Salmon has ever met a teenager, and if she has, she did so by observing from afar with a pair of binoculars, documenting their strange behaviours for later study. Throughout the book, the teenage characters are depicted doing various unrealistic or completely nonsensical things. For instance, one of the antagonists, Cooper, is set up to be a dominant figure in Red Sands’ teenage community. Cooper is eventually ousted from his throne of power by “the smashed crab brothers” Wyatt and Bailey, nicknamed for their aggressively red hair. “Wyatt holds centre stage at Cooper’s table, lounging next to Bailey with their Starling Cove soldiers scattered around them.” Otto then goes on to describe a feeling of anxiety and vulnerability at the sight of them now having seized the highest spot in the pecking order. Perhaps, since Red Sands is a small town in the middle of nowhere that places a lot of value on inter-community sports competitions, I can understand having a fairly rigid social hierarchy and a very clique-y culture. But I still find this depiction of group dynamics a little absurd. It reminds me of that scene in Mean Girls where the main character, Cady, watches a fight break out by the water fountain and envisions all the students as various animals snarling and posturing for dominance. I’ll give Salmon some grace, because I didn’t hate the protagonists and mostly enjoyed their interactions with other characters, but unlikely moments like this one pepper the book and negatively impacted my immersion.

Another example of the unlikely scenarios depicted in the book is when Otto’s decides to prove that he really belongs in Red Sands by winning the surf life saving competition, despite having never encountered surf life saving before his move to Australia a couple months ago. In fact, despite all of the main cast being fairly serious athletes, they rarely train and only occasionally go for a quick surfing trip. We Saw What You Started belies the actual work that athletes put in to succeed in their sports by making it all seem effortless. In one of the first scenes in the book, two of the main characters, Otto and Jasper, train for the upcoming surf life-saving competition happening in a week. During this, Otto laments, “I could do with more board training before the ironman race . . . paddling on my knees feels wobbly compared to surfing.” It’s great that he knows what to improve on, but a week’s training won’t make a real difference. This is compounded by the fact that Otto is literally never shown practicing this particular skill at any other point in the book, nor are any of the other boys, who are shown to be just as athletic. Despite this, Otto wins his race, which is mostly on the aforementioned board. For someone who picked up surf life saving perhaps a month ago, and with very little training, he certainly had no trouble adapting. However, I will give him this one, because prior to Otto’s move to Australia, he was surfing at an elite level. Clearly, he’s very athletic, but from my personal elite-level sport experience, I’m hesitant to believe the ease with which he achieves success.

My scepticism is, in part, because Otto’s ease is not echoed in Milly’s character, who is shown training. In fact, Milly trains to her detriment. She gets a concussion in the beginning of the book and is ordered to stop training for a while, maybe not even compete in the surf life saving competition at all. This is devastating to Milly, because she needs to prove to her dad that she’s better at surf life saving competitions than her brother so she can be club captain. So, obviously, she ignores the doctor’s orders and goes for a run anyway, resulting in her almost passing out. Since the surf life saving competition is set about a week after she gets concussed, it is technically possible, though unlikely, that she would be healed enough to compete. However, it’s so utterly ridiculous I have a hard time taking it seriously. In my sport, which is fairly intense, people occasionally get concussed, and I’ve never seen anyone playing again before two weeks have passed. The concussion might be the reason Milly’s athletic pursuits don’t come as easily to her as they do to the boys. Except, other than the running incident, the concussion rarely comes up, and Milly is soon allowed to train again. Is Milly not as athletic as the boys are, despite training harder than them? Does Salmon really believe that athletes don’t need to train to succeed, or does that belief only extend to the boys? Does Salmon play sports? Alright, look, I understand that it’s a thriller, and the sports don’t matter. But the surf life saving competition has been set up as on of the – if not the most – important parts of the book since the beginning. Even the arson plot sometimes feels like an afterthought compared to the surf life saving competition. If the club sports are the important part, then shouldn’t they be well-researched? Thinking about this gives me a headache.

But there’s another aspect of We Saw What You Started that is under-researched: Otto’s background. Despite the fact that Otto grew up in California and has only recently moved to Australia, his life there is almost never discussed, except to contrast the professionalism and terrifying nature of “California police” with the laidback and unthreatening “Australia police” and to occasionally give us some insight into his impoverished past. Milly is enamoured with Otto’s exotic, foreign “Californian lilt”, and Otto is confused by Jasper’s “thick Aussie drawl”. I suppose my main question is this: Why is Otto American at all? It doesn’t really matter to the plot whether he came from California or Kalamunda, and Salmon doesn’t seem particularly committed to making him seem “American”, rarely ever mentioning anything from his life in the US. In fact, Salmon never even elaborates on what region of California Otto is actually from. Even in his thoughts, he simply refers to “California”, “back in California”, and “on the farm in California”. It reminds me a little bit of myself when I was a little kid. I moved to Australia at a very young age and don’t remember much of my time in the US, so whenever other kids on the playground asked me where I was from, I’d just reply, “the US”, or “the United States of America” if I really wanted to get specific. I didn’t know where I was from. No one had ever told me. When I did learn, I began to add more background info: “Washington, near Seattle.” Salmon doesn’t seem to know where Otto is from, so why do this at all? My only theory is that Salmon wanted to give Otto a traumatic childhood living in a shabby part of town around cruel police officers, and the only way she could see to do that was to put him in America. Surely, Australia isn’t like that. Our neighbourhoods are innocuous and idyllic, our families are wonderful and loving and always stay together, and our police officers are nice guys down the road. Put like this, it comes off as downright xenophobic – an ignorant outsider’s idea of the looming behemoth of America, where people can’t have healthcare and are always shooting each other, where everyone is stupid and violent. Or, maybe Salmon just didn’t feel the need to flesh out Otto’s backstory, since it doesn’t really impact the plot. That’s plausible. But if so, it’s lazy, and I don’t know which is worse.

In short, the opinion of this teenager is that this book not only doesn’t cater to its target audience but seems to be taking active steps to offend them. The prose is passable if boring, the characters are cardboard cutout cliches, and the plot stretches believability a little too far, even for a thriller. All in all, We Saw What You Started comes off as somewhat lazy. It’s possible that others will find this book relatable and enjoy it. I did not. In my opinion, YA as a genre needs to change, since it’s obvious that no young adults are involved in the writing, editing or marketing of these so-called young adult books. Because of this, I’m not sure why any young adults would choose to involve themselves in the reading of these books either.

You can buy the book here.

Danica Hehre
Acquisitions Associate