In Ann Liang’s new novel, I Am Not Jessica Chen, teenage student Jenna Chen wishes she could be like her perfect cousin, Jessica. Jenna’s life is fine, but Jessica is smart and talented, with a Harvard acceptance and loads of popular friends.  Jessica is so sweet and thoughtful that everyone loves her, and it doesn’t hurt that her family’s loaded.

When Jenna wakes up one morning as Jessica, her wish has come true. Her life is perfect. (Just go with it, just like we went with Alice’s invisibility in If You Could See The Sun, by the same author.) Jenna-Jessica finally has the top grades and Ivy League acceptances and perfect skin and better clothes and everything.

I liked how relatable and attractive Jessica’s perfect life is. She gets a nice sunny spot to sit with her friends and eat pricey snacks at lunch. When she orders in food to her extra luxurious home, her parents don’t complain about the cost. The restaurant remembers her favorites, and the delivery guy thinks she’s pretty. It’s just a series of every little thing being the best. This whole sequence felt like a charming update to an 80s movie. Our everyday Jenna is living the high-school dream.

But as Jenna lives as Jessica, the world around her isn’t wondering where Jenna is, and as time goes by, everyone seems to forget Jenna ever existed. So, as she lives out Jessica’s perfect life, her real life and family are slipping further away, and the real Jessica must be somewhere else…

I previously read If You Could See The Sun, and as I read, I thought a lot about my years teaching in China, particularly at a Beijing high school. I now teach at a boarding school in New England, and I thought about the mix of old money, legacy prep-school students, scholarship students, and full-price tuition students.

This reality grounds the stories for me and makes it easier to accept the magical parts, without feeling like it’s full-on fantasy novel. The author does this well. Again, we don’t get too bogged down in explanations for how the supernatural events came about. It’s more about how the protagonist reacts to the invisibility or body-switching than explaining how this happened.  If You Could See The Sun had a lot about the pressure to be academically successful, and one highly-successful student’s desire to be seen as something besides the study machine. I Am Not Jessica Chen also looks at academic pressure, and one perfectly-fine student’s desire to come in first for a change. And, again, the supernatural element highlights the class and race elements in the story.

I Am Not Jessica Chen is a YA novel, with a focus on high-school life and teenage pressures, but it works for adult readers too, because daydreaming about a different, better life doesn’t have an age limit.