If You Could See the Sun Alice Sun by Ann Liang

If You Could See the Sun Alice Sun is invisible. But only sometimes, and she can’t exactly control when. It all started after the awards ceremony at her international boarding school in Beijing. One second she was there, the next second she wasn’t. But Alice is resourceful, and devises a way to make money off of this inconvenience by taking up miscellaneous jobs across the school. Jobs only possible because of her invisibility. Hopefully she can use the money to pay her school tuition, whose fees have become unaffordable for Alice and her family. But jobs are piling up and becoming riskier leaving Alice to contend with the ever blurring line between her morals, and the extra cash she so desperately needs to continue her education in Beijing. If You Could See the Sun is a witty and entertaining read. The book has a perfect balance between personal drama and emotional intrigue with excitement and action. Alice is a fascinating and almost startlingly relatable young woman. Her struggles to fit in, academic expectations, and inconsistent and constantly changing moral and social standards, are just a few things that readers can resonate with. As the story progresses she makes bad decisions and hurts people around her, but by the end she is truly apologetic for the harm she has caused and the author does a good job of making her motivations explicitly clear. The book was surprisingly suspenseful and detoured in a direction I wasn’t anticipating towards the end. I really liked the ending and think it tied up the book in a nice way that was both satisfying for the reader while not attempting to justify Alice’s reckless and harmful actions. If You Could See the Sun was a great look at social and academic pressures and the lengths that they can drive us to, while being a well crafted adventure.