If You Could See the Sun

If You Could See the Sun is a young adult fantasy novel by Ann Liang, published in 2022. Alice Sun is a scholarship student at an elite international boarding school in Beijing, surrounded by the children of China's richest and most influential families, and she has spent her time there feeling as though nobody sees her.

Then she becomes invisible in fact rather than in feeling, in episodes she cannot control and cannot explain. The timing is bad, because her parents tell her that they can no longer afford the tuition even with the scholarship. Rather than leave, she turns the problem into a business, finding out the secrets her classmates want to know and charging them for it.

The work starts small and does not stay that way. What begins with petty scandals escalates into real crimes, and every job asks Alice to weigh the money she needs against the conscience she would rather keep. The novel follows a girl who has been overlooked becoming the person everybody suddenly depends on, and counts what that costs her.