<p>This essay examines Ross Welford’s pre-teen novel <i>What Not to Do If You Turn Invisible</i> (2016) as a case study for defining the contemporary invisibility narrative and for exploring its relevance to current concerns about ubiquitous surveillance and the resulting hypervisibility. Welford’s novel illustrates how the metaphor of invisibility operates in the early adolescent narrative at the threshold between the magic invisibility of childhood and the adult logics of political invisibility, inscribing the form of the invisibility narrative into the current political and social landscape of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019). Building on earlier discussions of surveillance as a key concern in young adult texts, this essay highlights how the transition from late childhood to early adolescence has itself become a site of surveillance, where even children must cultivate practices of invisibility in order to resist surveillance. The early adolescent invisibility narrative emerges not as simple comic or magic formula fiction, but as a cultural symptom of the contemporary demand to construct the self: the protagonist Ethel Leatherhead embodies the process of coming of age under the paradox of being incessantly watched (hypervisibility) while desiring invisibility (as freedom from social control), ultimately being compelled to seek visibility on equal terms as a recognition by the other. Welford’s novel offers a significant example of how children’s literature negotiates the pressures of hypervisibility, suggesting the potential of narratives to imagine (temporary) escape from surveillance capitalism through imaginary invisibility.</p>