If You Could See the Sun

Plot Summary:
She is, after all, a scholarship student at the elite Beijing International School, where she’s constantly bullied by her peers for being too poor, or so they say. And yet the pressure from her family for academic performance to elevate them from poverty is heavy enough to crush. One day, as she wanders home after school, Alice suddenly finds that she has acquired an extraordinary gift: she can turn invisible-but only for short periods of time.

Alice reasons that her special talent will become the way out of her financial problems, and she joins forces with her academic rival Henry Li to start offering her services as a kind of “invisible spy” for her classmates: she collects secrets, realizes requests, and digs up hidden truth in exchange for money. But as she moves deeper into this secret world, she begins to wonder if she is ethically correct in doing this and if it is right to know the dreadful truth.

Key Features:

Invisibility and Power:

The invisibility power of Alice represents a fight about being seen which she faces through invisible self, in the affluent world. It is also used as a tool to investigate power—what people do for power and to keep it.

Class Divide:

A theme of class inequality is involved in the elite school in which this novel is structured. Alice always knows that she comes from a very different world than that of her peers, who enjoy high-class lifestyles. Such awareness adds tension to the decisions and relationships in the novel.
Moral Questions:

But the book soon prompts consequential questions about morality and how to define limits as Alice starts spying on people with the help of her invisibility.
Alice is basically forced into a dilemma: a need to acquire money and an impact her actions may have on the rest of the people.
Rivalry and Friendship:

Alice and Henry Li begin as adversaries but eventually become something more: a bond that sometimes boils with tension and often interlaces humor.
Self-Discovery:

Beneath the fantastic elements the novel then stands as a journey of self-discovery for Alice. She navigates through adolescence dangers and the need to place identity as one finds out who they want to be.
Privilege and Class: The novel casts a rather sharp commentary on the realms of wealth, privilege, and inequality, especially in the realm of education.
Ambition and Morality: Alice’s ambition to not be poor and to succeed forces her into very hard moral decisions, which creates interesting tension between ambition and moral integrity.
Identity and Beling: Alice is unable to be “seen” in a world in which the invisible metrics of money and status define worth. Her invisibility power becomes a metaphor for these feelings of exclusion as well as the desire to be recognized.
In “If You Could See the Sun,” Graeme Macraeurn had masterfully woven the elements of fantasy and living problems in regards to class, identity, and the conflict of moral tension. The coming-of-age story made readers relate and understand what it takes to be successful as well as cost one’s ambitions.