“Descartes was wrong when he said, ‘To live well, you must live unseen.’ To live well, you must learn to see yourself first.”

If You Could See the Sun, by Ann Liang

Summary

Alice Sun has always felt invisible at her elite Beijing international boarding school, where she’s the only scholarship student among China’s most rich and influential teens. But then she starts uncontrollably turning invisible—actually invisible.

When her parents drop the news that they can no longer afford her tuition, even with the scholarship, Alice hatches a plan to monetize her strange new power—she’ll discover the scandalous secrets her classmates want to know, for a price.

But as the tasks escalate from petty scandals to actual crimes, Alice must decide if it’s worth losing her conscience—or even her life.

In this genre-bending YA debut, a Chinese American girl monetizes her strange new invisibility powers by discovering and selling her wealthy classmates’ most scandalous secrets.

My Thoughts

This was my second Ann Liang book, in pretty quick succession after I read I Am Not Jessica Chen and adored it. It’s amazing that this was the author’s debut because it is very strong as a debut, and demonstrates her strengths in high-school YA dark academia with a slight hint of magical realism. Alice is a fun protagonist, and her love interest Henry Li and she have a wonderful dynamic. This book focuses less on the academic struggles of the school and more about the class dynamics of Alice’s life as a scholarship student in an academy of wealthy, elite teenagers. Liang does a good job of balancing romance with the desperate hunger to pursue one’s dreams regardless of the cost, framed by an analysis of privilege and wealth.

Alice is very much not a perfect person. She can be envious at times, quick to judge others (which proves a mistake when she tries to give her roommate Chanel a chance and the two become fast friends after four years of orbiting each other), and willing to cross lines, though how far she is willing to go is the question. Alice tells Henry that “I’d rather be the villain who lives to the end than the hero who winds up dead,” and while this is true, the book gives her the opportunity to figure out what her lines are, and how far she is willing to go for the success that attending an elite boarding school will bring her. You are constantly assessing and reassessing characters as the novel progresses and Alice learns more about the people around her. She very much does have a biased POV, but it makes the read all the more fun. Her invisibility power is taken somewhere I didn’t fully expect, and her learning to control it, as well as the narrative meaning of her invisibility, are very well done.

Romance wise, Liang is excellent at writing an academic rivals to lovers dynamic. He’s a bit oblivious, but very much a gentleman, and his outburst of “Wait, we hate each other?” is the cherry on top of their entire dynamic. While Alice’s story is one of desperation and class, Henry’s is one of recognizing privilege, and realizing that even though he works hard and is confident, he simply does not face the same injustices and unfairness as Alice, and has a safety net that she does not. However, he also shows Alice that his privilege does not exempt him from struggle or hardship. The entire school spends the book watching the two orbit around each other obliviously, which was adorable, and it gave the book some immaculate Gossip Girl vibes. I think that their entire dynamic could be summed up by the song Mastermind by Taylor Swift, personally.

This is probably one of the only dark academia books I have read where I genuinely works better in a high school setting rather than a college setting, because not only does it give Alice time to improve by the end and specific goals to reach, but certain dynamics can only be achieved via the rich teenagers cloistered together dynamic. I’d overall recommend this as a read; it was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to reading the stand-alone spinoff of this book, I Could Give You the Moon, which is set to debut in 2026 and tell Chanel’s story.

Review: ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫

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