Synopsis:
Winning a scholarship to California’s most prestigious art school seems like a fairy tale ending to Sabine Reye’s awful senior year. After losing both her mother and her home, Sabine longs for a place where she belongs.
But the cutthroat world of visual arts is nothing like what Sabine had imagined. Colin Krell, the renowned faculty member whom she had hoped would mentor her, seems to take merciless delight in tearing down her best work—and warns her that she’ll lose the merit-based award if she doesn’t improve.
Desperate and humiliated, Sabine doesn’t know where to turn. Then she meets Adam, a grad student who understands better than anyone the pressures of art school. He even helps Sabine get insight on Krell by showing her the modern master’s work in progress, a portrait that’s sold for a million dollars sight unseen.
Sabine is enthralled by the portrait; within those swirling, colorful layers of paint is the key to winning her inscrutable teacher’s approval. Krell did advise her to improve her craft by copying a painting she connects with . . . but what would he think of Sabine secretly painting her own version of his masterpiece? And what should she do when she accidentally becomes party to a crime so well -plotted that no one knows about it but her?
Complex and utterly original, What I Want You to See is a gripping tale of deception, attraction, and moral ambiguity.
Publication Date: February 4th, 2020
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Genres: Young Adult, Fiction
My Rating: 
My Favourite Quote: *subject to change*
“And I especially like when you posit that ambiguity in novels and abstraction in paintings both force the viewer to draw their own conclusions.”
Book Links: Goodreads | Amazon | Book Depository | B&N | iTunes | Google Books
My thoughts are muddled even after giving myself a day to think about what I would like to write. Truthfully, WIWYTS is utterly outside my zone of comfort. It falls outside–almost only barely touching–the genres I typically go for. So why did I choose to read WIWYTS? I don’t know. When I read the blurb, I wanted to read it. I was curious and I felt a certain … draw, (shall we say?) to the story.
My instincts weren’t wrong. Despite being so outside my comfort zone, I had no problems reading this book. The humiliation, desperation, fear, excitement, pain and passion in this book are quick to draw you in and keep you from moving.
“I saw you out walking the other night,” she says. “You were lost.”
It takes a moment before I realize she must have spotted me the night I saw her eating ice cream. “I wasn’t lost. I live around here.”
“Lost inside, not outside. Lost in here.” she says, tapping her chest.
I’m hardly one to be caught by surprise in a book, but I rather was in a way. There were some ploys so utterly visible to the eye, and others that in my own ignorance and raptness to the story, I hadn’t placed. A lot of things fall together just as they fall apart in the protagonist’s life.
Usually, the protagonist isn’t questioned so much, isn’t put in too tight a spot without support, isn’t alone in the real sense of the term. But in reality, especially after one makes a mistake, one often finds themselves alone in a battleground of their own making.
What I Want You To See questions a lot of our own ideas of what’s right and not. Whether the rightness or wrongness of something is linked specifically to your situation or to your perception. There were some moments where you wish the protagonist took a stand, moved a step forward, but her learning itself was in how/when or if she would do this. And the fear she experiences was utterly understandable.
Four stars. I would definitely recommend.
Author Bio
Catherine Linkais the author of the young adult novel WHAT I WANT YOU TO SEE as well as the dystopian series A GIRL CALLED FEARLESS and A GIRL UNDONE. A GIRL CALLED FEARLESS was an ABA Indie Next Pick and won the Young Adult Novel Award 2014 from the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association.
A frequent speaker at writing and teen conferences, Catherine received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and worked as a young adult book buyer for an independent bookstore for seven years.
Prior to pursuing a career in publishing, she studied international politics at Georgetown University followed by a master’s degree in business at the University of North Carolina. Catherine is married and lives with her husband in the San Gabriel foothills. Visit her at on her website.
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GIVEAWAY!
Win a copy of WHAT I WANT YOU TO SEE by Catherine Linka (US Only). This giveaway on January 29th2020 and ends on February 12th2020
WHAT I WANT YOU TO SEE Blog Tour Stops
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January 30th
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February 1st
Bookablereads – Review + Favourite Quotes
February 2nd
February 3rd
The Reading Life – Interview
February 4th
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