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Book Review: Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan

Counting by 7sTitle: Counting by 7s

Author: Holly Goldberg Sloan

Genre: Contemporary, Middle Grade, PoC

Publisher: Dial
Publication Date: August 29 2013
Hardcover: 384 Pages

In the tradition of Out of My Mind, Wonder, and Mockingbird, this is an intensely moving middle grade novel about being an outsider, coping with loss, and discovering the true meaning of family.

Willow Chance is a twelve-year-old genius, obsessed with nature and diagnosing medical conditions, who finds it comforting to count by 7s. It has never been easy for her to connect with anyone other than her adoptive parents, but that hasn’t kept her from leading a quietly happy life . . . until now.

Suddenly Willow’s world is tragically changed when her parents both die in a car crash, leaving her alone in a baffling world. The triumph of this book is that it is not a tragedy. This extraordinarily odd, but extraordinarily endearing, girl manages to push through her grief. Her journey to find a fascinatingly diverse and fully believable surrogate family is a joy and a revelation to read.

Stand alone or series: Stand alone

How did I get this book: Review Copy from the publishers – from BEA

Format (e- or p-): Print

Why did I read this book: I’ve heard nothing but good things about Holly Goldberg Sloan’s debut I’ll Be There. Then whilst at BEA, I saw the Middle Grade buzz panel which featured this book and it sounded wonderful.

Review:

Warning: this review contains spoilers

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when I fell out of love with Counting by 7s but it happened slowly yet inexorably in the hours after I finished reading it.

On the surface, this is an innocuous book, full of good intentions: it is a book featuring different stories about diverse PoC characters (including its protagonist). It is also a beautiful story about different kinds of families, about deep connections that can be formed between people from different walks of life and above all, it is about surviving adversity. It is a touching story that made me laugh and that made me cry. But it also made me ponder and question its main message.

Counting by 7s’ main character is Willow Chance, a little girl who has lost two sets of parents in her short life – she never knew her blood parents and her adoptive ones die in a terrible accident. She is all alone in the world apart from Dell, a school counsellor whose therapy methods are completely unprofessional; and from a couple of new friends she has met recently. Those friends are the siblings Mai and Quang-ha (who is also seeing Dell for his disruptive behaviour) who end up convincing their mother Pattie to take care of Willow temporarily.

Willow is a special person: she is a 12-year-old genius, obsessed with nature and with diagnosing medical conditions and who has found it difficult to deal and connect to people until this tragedy has forced her to.

The story is centred on Willow’s specialness – despite her oddness she is extremely endearing and moves everybody around her that they all end up changing their lives for the better. It is a touching story that made me laugh and that made me cry. But it also made me ponder and question its main message.

It is not for nothing that the official blurb compares it to Wonder by R J Palacio: it has a similar motif, a similar structure (head-jumping) and it provoked a similar reaction on me.

I had three main problems with the novel: Dell’s counselling theories that go basically unchallenged; the novel’s ending; and its strange relationship with money.

Dell – Dell is a terrible counsellor who doesn’t really know what he is doing and who often tries to exploit the system, who at first tried to exploit Willow’s knowledge for his own gain and who has a way of labelling his patients in an extremely problematic way. For some reason, schools sent him their worst cases and he does absolutely nothing to help them. In fairness, Dell is NOT supposed to be a good counsellor but he is shown in a fairly sympathetic light that is also supposed to be endearing and funny. Willow calls him out on the way that he labels the kids he sees but this is as far as the narrative goes on really challenging his role – in the end, he is shown as having grown and changed but no word is said about the kids whose lives he has affected negatively and who he was supposed to have helped. That his therapy method worked for Willow (because of her specialness) does not mean anything in a wider context but is everything that the novel is worried about.

The ending: in the end, Pattie ends up adopting Willow. Now, up until the very ending of the novel, Pattie was shown as a resourceful, intelligent, caring woman who loves her kids and who cares for Willow deeply. She is also someone who struggles to make ends meet, who runs her own small business but who still has financial problems. Her and her two kids live in a one room garage with no bathroom or kitchen. She shares a bed with her daughter. It is hinted that their living conditions is one of the main reasons why her son is having behaviour issues. They are presented as extremely poor which only makes their attempt to help Willow all the more heart-warming.

Then in the end it is revealed that Pattie is actually RICH, that she has been saving money all this time and has enough to buy an ENTIRE APARTMENT BUILDING. This is grating and confusing within the context of the novel because the Pattie that was presented to the reader throughout the novel is not someone who would impose such hardships (living in a garage!) on her own children for NO GOOD REASON. That she’d only reveal her money after her love for ULTRA SPECIAL Willow and not her own children serves only to reinforce Willow’s specialness.

Which brings me to my last point.

The Money issue: one of the main topics of the novel is the question of poverty and how it affects peoples’ lives. Surviving adversity despite poverty is one of the main drives of the novel and one of the connecting points between characters. In the end, the revelation that Pattie had tons of money all along and all of their money problems are magically solved undermines the topic of dealing with poverty. Plus, ANOTHER CHARACTER ALSO WINS THE LOTTERY BY THE WAY. He turns out to be the guy who is going to be the little girl’s adoptive father.

The book is so focused on Willow’s specialness that it forgets the rest of the world (like the other kids with equally real problems that Dell is supposed to be helping), backtracks on the portrayal of the rest of their characters and detracts from a powerful storyline about poverty to shower money on just about everybody.

I think it is that type of book that tries so hard to be about GOOD PEOPLE and it’s so well intentioned that I feel like a jerk for writing this review. In a way it is just like those “feel good movies of the year” that so often have problematic underlying messages that almost escapes your attention because you are injected with such a huge dose of happy-inducing saccharine storylines. But when you come down from that high, you hit rock bottom fast and furious.

Notable Quotes/Parts:

A genius shoots at something no
one else can see, and hits it.

We sit together outside the Fosters Freeze at a sea-green, metal picnic table.

All four of us.

We eat soft ice cream, which has been plunged into a vat of liquid chocolate (that then hardens into a crispy shell).

I don’t tell anyone that what makes this work is wax. Or to be more accurate: edible, food-grade paraffin wax.

As the chocolate cools, it holds the vanilla goodness prisoner.

Our job is to set it free.

Ordinarily, I don’t even eat ice-cream cones. And if I do, I obsess in such a precise way as to prevent even a drop of disorder.

But not today.

I’m in a public place.

I’m not even spying.

And my ice-cream cone is a big, drippy mess.

I’m right now someone that other people might find interesting to observe.

Why?

Well first of all, I’m speaking Vietnamese, which is not my “native tongue.”

I really like that expression because in general, I think people don’t give this contracting muscle credit for how much work it does.

So thank you, tongue.

Rating: I have no idea how to rate this. I loved it as a I read it, disliked it afterwards.

Reading Next: Conjured by Sarah Beth Durst

Buy the Book:

(click on the links to purchase)

Ebook available for kindle US, nook & iBookstore

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44 Comments

  • hapax
    August 20, 2013 at 11:44 am

    Oh dear.

    I remember that when people were raving about WONDER, and I kept saying “But… but… but…”, I felt like such a big meanie.

    It sounds like this one would be just the same.

  • Ana
    August 20, 2013 at 12:09 pm

    Hapax – I know exactly what you mean about the Wonder phenomenon and i have been feeling about this one exactly the same.

  • superbwg
    August 20, 2013 at 1:08 pm

    I have the same problem with several books I have read. While reading them I am like “this is awesome, what a great book”, then as time goes on and I think about it, all I see are problematic spots, drives my husband crazy. Sometimes this ruins the book for me and others I can go back and deal.

  • Annie
    August 20, 2013 at 2:18 pm

    I’m sad to see you didn’t like this one more! I loved I’ll Be There and have been anticipating Counting by 7’s ever since. I know that feeling of wanting to love a book but ending up not liking it at all! I have yet to decide if I want to read this book – maybe I’ll see if I like Wonder first?

  • AnimeJune
    August 23, 2013 at 8:46 am

    “In a way it is just like those “feel good movies of the year” that so often have problematic underlying messages that almost escapes your attention because you are injected with such a huge dose of happy-inducing saccharine storylines.” *cough*THE BLIND SIDE*cough*

    I am in total agreement with you. I hated the fact that her kids had to live in a garage and suddenly she has all this money – and the worst thing about it is that the novel already had a narrative framework in place that could have explained this development – or at least explained it better.

    Another theme in this novel is compulsion – everyone has their own little obsessive quirks that can be helpful or harmful. Willow, for instance, is extremely obsessive about germs and what she eats. Dell is a hoarder of underwear, he can’t throw anything away.

    All they had to do, really, was demonstrate how Pattie was perhaps compulsively hoarding money because she was terrified of the future and when they might really need it. They showed her as being fearful and superstitious, after all.

    I saw a movie a couple of years ago where a son has been helping his impoverished Holocaust survivor parents with their failing business, and accidentally discovers hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed under the floorboards. His mother, terrified of being taken away by the Nazis again, had been compelled ever since to squirrel away every extra cent. Even when she and her husband were living in poverty, that terror kept her from spending even a penny of what she’d hoarded and she even reacts violently when her son finds it and tries to spend it!

    They could have gone in that direction with Pattie and even though it would still have been SURPRISE MONEY ALL OUR PROBLEMS SOLVED YAY at the end, it would have made Pattie look like a moderately more understandable parent towards her children.

  • Anonymous
    November 26, 2013 at 2:46 pm

    I siad I need to learn to count by 7’s!

  • Anonymous
    October 30, 2014 at 11:55 am

    😀 🙂 🙁 😮 😯 😕 8) 😆 😡 😛 😳 😥 👿 😈 🙄 😉 ❗ ❓ 💡 ➡ 😐 :mrgreen:

  • Anonymous
    November 2, 2014 at 4:11 pm

    i loved i

  • Anonymous
    November 19, 2014 at 10:34 pm

    I loved your book counting by 7s and I’m even going to meet the author of the book

  • Anonymous
    November 19, 2014 at 10:35 pm

    The counting by 7s really inspired me

  • Anonymous
    November 20, 2014 at 6:15 pm

    same

  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2014 at 8:26 pm

    http://thebooksmugglers.com/wp-includes/
    images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif

  • Anonymous
    April 1, 2015 at 4:04 pm

    Where does a Willow go to school exactly?

  • anonymous
    April 20, 2015 at 5:10 pm

    i really like this book i have read this and it is sad in the begening but then after it gets better and better

  • Feisty Harriet
    June 12, 2015 at 12:35 pm

    Thank you for this!! I had so many similar problems with “Eleanor and Park” and I just couldn’t love it because of the massive socio-economic and child neglect issues.

    xox

  • Talia
    July 30, 2015 at 9:48 am

    Great book

  • Jhmujgujshdbrh
    August 27, 2015 at 6:45 am

    Loved the book

  • Anonymous
    September 3, 2015 at 4:44 pm

    😀 🙂

  • Anonymous
    September 22, 2015 at 8:49 pm

    this is the best ever report

  • Rose
    October 4, 2015 at 3:57 pm

    ????????????
    THE BOOK KIND OF SUCKS
    NO OFFENCE TO THE AUTHOR

  • raven gilchrist
    October 13, 2015 at 1:48 pm

    the title couting by 7s relates to the charactes,especailly willow,

  • Rain
    October 25, 2015 at 10:23 pm

    Thank you so much for this review. I felt like the only person who was a bit annoyed by these issues.
    I also thought the ending was such a letdown.

  • Anonymous
    December 8, 2015 at 6:32 pm

    Finally (!!!), someone who understands my viewing of this book!

  • UnknownButCool
    January 24, 2016 at 7:58 pm

    Amazing! ???

    I acculley own a copy soooo….
    But that’s cool online! And good for people who don’t know the book but love to read!!! ????

  • erica
    February 11, 2016 at 12:20 pm

    i love this book

  • Sharenity carothers
    February 22, 2016 at 4:17 pm

    Hey

  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2016 at 7:30 pm

    really

  • swaggy pocahontas
    August 1, 2016 at 5:38 pm

    true

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2016 at 9:13 pm

    Very good and pretty in-depth book review. You did miss a few points, but otherwise you did a great job! Continue writing these reviews

  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2016 at 5:12 pm

    🙂

  • Anonymous
    December 1, 2016 at 5:19 pm

    It was a great book = – )

  • Anonymous
    January 8, 2017 at 5:04 pm

    no it really dosent

  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2017 at 12:13 pm

    Sequoia Middle School.

  • LivandTea.spamm
    March 28, 2017 at 12:16 pm

    Do you mean to say : “no, it really wasn’t”?
    And dosent isn’t a word, however ‘doesn’t’ happens to be one.

  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2017 at 12:17 pm

    Do you mean to say: “no it really wasn’t”?
    “Dosent” isn’t a word, however “doesn’t” happens to be one.

  • Cntng b 7??s
    March 28, 2017 at 5:05 pm

    I think something is slightly wrong with your computer or electronic device. It appears that you sent out the same message twice. It is possible that your web page did not load. If the problem occurs again, simply refresh the page.

  • Anonymous
    March 31, 2017 at 1:20 pm

    Yes, I do not know who sent that, but they should most likely get their electronic device checked. That could be a sign of a virus, or perhaps they were sitting next to an annoying friend.

  • bobby
    April 13, 2017 at 11:29 am

    hi im bobby

  • Wyovolleygirl101
    May 11, 2017 at 5:35 pm

    The number of pages is 416

  • Anonymous
    June 17, 2017 at 1:05 pm

    Is it in any way inappropriate at times?

  • Anonymous
    July 6, 2017 at 11:01 am

    So do you know the setting of this book, like when are where it took place?

  • Anonymous
    August 7, 2017 at 1:59 pm

    no

  • Book_critic
    August 8, 2017 at 12:21 pm

  • Anonymous
    October 25, 2017 at 5:06 pm

    no, it is not inappropriate at all.

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