This lovely, wise tale is not just about loss but about survival, connection and kindness, and its narrative style underscores the theme of community. Thanks to her history as a bullied mixed-race kid in Vietnam, Pattie bonds fiercely with the grieving child. When Willow’s parents suddenly die, Mai persuades her mother, Pattie, to take in the girl on a temporary basis. There she befriends a scrappy teen named Mai Nguyen. At her California middle school, Willow’s oddities soon land her in weekly sessions with the district’s incompetent counselor. Adopted at birth by a loving white couple, 12-year-old Willow Chance is a “person of color” (her term) and a genius obsessed with medical conditions and plants. Do today’s titles adequately reflect the variety of our nation? Has publishing moved beyond the multicultural trend of the 1990s to feature characters whose race, culture, religion and cognitive or physical ability may be incidental to, rather than the sole focus of, the story? Happily, we can add Holly Goldberg Sloan’s tender, nuanced Counting by 7s to the contemporary novels that seek to embrace the broader range of the American experience. “Diversity is a constant, important topic in the children’s book world. In the capable hands of this writer, readers will adore Willow Chance and wish her a good and happy and mostly normal future with her new family.” The writing is remarkably funny for what could have been a sad tale of growing up surrounded by people who have no reason to care about you. Yes, you can see the ending coming, especially if you are an adult reader. With an array of distinctly fascinating characters parading in and out of the book, I truly hated to turn the last page. This is one smart, resourceful 12-year-old.Īlternating chapters are told in the voices of her school counselor and an older girl whose Vietnamese mom runs a nail salon. Give credit to her adoptive parents, who ‘Really Truly L-O-V-E’ Willow. Instead, she teaches herself Vietnamese, researches rare diseases, and tends her garden. Ever,’ Willow seems untroubled by being outside the mainstream. Acknowledging both her strangeness and that, despite being a thinker, she’s ‘never the teacher’s pet. Willow Chance – a perfect name for the highly-gifted narrator – begins chapter two of Counting by 7s by going back to the beginning, in a new school where she knows no one. If the story’s skillfully written and the characters cleverly conceived, it’s hard to stop. “If you know by the end of chapter one that the narrator’s parents have been killed, do you keep on reading?
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