Some books announce their tone in the first paragraph and quietly retreat into something blander by chapter three. I Could Give You the Moon by Ann Liang keeps its promise. The opening line (“The best thing about heartbreak is how spectacularly predictable it is”) is a thesis statement disguised as a quip, and Chanel Cao, our reigning Beijing It Girl, spends the next four hundred pages trying to live by it before life decides otherwise.
Returning readers will recognize the territory. If You Could See the Sun introduced Airington International Boarding School and its glittering student body. This Time It’s Real showed Liang can write banter with the lightness of meringue. I Hope This Doesn’t Find You pushed her into sharper protagonist territory, and A Song to Drown Rivers and I Am Not Jessica Chen let her flex her mythic and supernatural muscles. I Could Give You the Moon by Ann Liang feels like the sum of those experiments: funnier, sharper, and stranger than her earlier romances.
A quick setup, since spoilers are a sin
Chanel curates her life the way a stylist arranges a closet: by season, by need, by what looks best in soft lighting. Her parents have secretly separated. Her followers have no idea. Ares Yin, the new boy at school who looks like a knife wrapped in a school blazer, refuses to even meet her eye. His brother has been missing for three years. When the two of them stumble across a vision in a moonlit Beijing lake, one that shows the future, they each decide to use the other to get what they want.
That is the absolute most you are getting from me about the plot. The pleasure of this book lives in the small turns, not the big reveals.
What Ann Liang does better than almost anyone writing YA right now
The voice. Always the voice. Chanel narrates with the kind of weaponized self-awareness that lesser authors fumble into snark or shock value, and Liang lets her stay funny without letting her stay shallow. There is a scene early on where Chanel walks her best friend through the five stages of heartbreak with the weary expertise of someone who has been studying the symptoms in her own mother. You laugh, then you wince, then you realize you have just been told everything you need to know about Chanel’s wounds without a single line of exposition.
The Beijing setting deserves its own slow round of applause. Liang doesn’t gesture at hotpot and call it a day. You get Xiaohongshu trends, brown sugar ginger tea offered by hotel receptionists, malatang runs after fights, fuerdai economics, the specific way old aunties play chess in courtyards on summer evenings. The texture is so confident it never feels like a tour. It feels like home.
A few things the book pulls off especially well:
- The slow burn earns its slowness. Ares and Chanel share roughly the same amount of physical contact in the first two hundred pages as a polite handshake, and somehow it crackles the entire time.
- Body image and parental pressure get the gravity they deserve. Chanel’s mother is one of the most quietly devastating figures in recent YA, and Liang refuses to flatten her into a villain.
- The dual POV pulls real weight. Ares’s chapters are leaner, lonelier, and more wounded than Chanel’s, and the contrast deepens both of them.
- The magical realism stays atmospheric instead of mechanical. The lake visions feel less like a plot device and more like a metaphor that briefly grew teeth.
Where the book wobbles
A four-star average is generous and earned, but it isn’t a five, and the reasons are worth naming.
The middle third sags. Once the central premise is set up, the plot has to carry a lot of scheming and reconnaissance, and the pacing occasionally goes flat under all that planning. Henry Li, the in-house tech genius friend, mostly exists to solve problems with a few keystrokes, which is convenient for Chanel and slightly disappointing for the reader.
The underground fight club subplot, while atmospheric, feels grafted on at moments. Liang clearly enjoys writing it, and Sangui (a disarmingly chatty thief with rules) is fun on the page, but the tonal jumps between the glittering boarding school and the bloody concrete one can feel like changing shoes mid-sprint.
A few smaller notes:
- The vision mechanic is never fully explained, which works for the romance but will frustrate readers who want their magical realism on a tighter leash.
- Some secondary characters (Haili, Alice, Rainie) read more as sketches than fully drawn people.
- The resolution wraps with a neatness that some readers will find satisfying and others will find a touch too pat for the chaos that preceded it.
These are quibbles, not deal-breakers. I Could Give You the Moon by Ann Liang is doing more than most YA romances bother to attempt, and it lands the bigger swings.
The themes that actually stuck
Underneath the prom queen scheming and the supernatural lake water, this book is asking a real question. Chanel has been raised to believe affection is something you negotiate by becoming small, polished, and quotable. Ares has been raised to believe nobody will love him without a transaction attached. The romance only matters because the book is honest about how badly broken people can sabotage being seen, and how much courage it takes to drop the pose long enough to be known.
Liang threads in something she has been working toward across her catalog: the way mother-daughter relationships in East Asian households can carry love through criticism, control, and small daily corrections that leave bruises you can’t photograph. Chanel’s mom is not a monster. That is what makes her devastating.
Who should read this book
This one is for readers who:
- Love a sharp-tongued protagonist who slowly lets her guard down without ever losing her edge.
- Want romance with a real spine of grief, ambition, and family pressure underneath.
- Are drawn to Asian, specifically Chinese, settings that feel lived in rather than performed.
- Don’t mind a touch of magical realism flavoring a contemporary story.
If you are allergic to influencer culture as subject matter, you will probably hit an early wall with Chanel. If you want a romance where the leads communicate openly by chapter five, this isn’t that book. The whole engine here is the slow corrosion of two carefully built lies.
What to read next
If I Could Give You the Moon by Ann Liang hits the right nerve, try these:
- If You Could See the Sun and This Time It’s Real by Ann Liang, for more Airington and her romance voice.
- Loveboat, Taipei by Abigail Hing Wen, for rich Asian teens in over their heads at an elite school.
- If I’m Being Honest by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka, for the sharp-mouthed protagonist who learns to bend.
- American Royals by Katharine McGee, for high-society scheming with romantic stakes.
- These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong, for the dual POV and Chinese setting cranked darker.
- Counting Down with You by Tashie Bhuiyan, for a gentler, family-grounded YA romance with a similar emotional honesty.
Final thoughts
I Could Give You the Moon by Ann Liang is the work of a writer paying attention to her own previous books and asking how she can be braver. It is funnier than This Time It’s Real, sharper than If You Could See the Sun, and more emotionally generous than I Hope This Doesn’t Find You. The premise wobbles in places. The scheming overreaches in others. None of that quite matters by the time Ares offers Chanel something she has never asked anyone for, and the moon, that ridiculous and overused symbol, suddenly stops being a metaphor.
Read it for the voice. Stay for the parts of yourself you didn’t expect Chanel to find.