As part of the Neev Literature Festival’s reading challenge, I’ve been attending as many author interactions as I can. I love them! One session I attended last month was with Holly Goldberg Sloan, who spoke about her book The Elephant in the Room. I haven’t read that one, but I have read To Night Owl From Dogfish, one of my favourite books of all time. (During the session, I also asked her about how the experience of co-authoring an epistolary book was. The response was lovely, but that’s a story for another time!)
I read up a bit about Sloan before attending the session, and of course, I came across the award-winning Counting by 7s. The list of books I want to read is endless, though, so I just tucked this one away for later, well aware that the “later” might never come.
But then, less than a week after the interaction, I asked the children at my creative writing programme to write a letter to an author. One of the young writers wrote to Holly Goldberg Sloan because she’d read and loved Counting by 7s. She said that that was the book that drew her out of a reading slump. And that’s why I ended up I looking for and reading the book.
Willow is a gifted child. But what does that mean when she has lost her parents not once but twice? As she copes with loss and grief, will she ever find a place where she belongs?
The taxi driver Jairo thinks of her as a lucky charm, but she does not want to be anyone’s lucky charm.
Quang-Ha, whose family takes Willow in, seems to resent her, and she cannot quite blame him.
Dell Duke, her counsellor seems like he needs help from her, not the other way around.
But slowly, with an awkward, unusual girl at the centre of things, people come together. Willow, in her own quirky way, manages to make friends. What is truly heart-warming is the lengths she is willing to go to make friends.
Her new friend Mai speaks Vietnamese? Willow learns Vietnamese and speaks it to grow closer to Mai.
Mai’s mother Patty Nguyen needs help redesigning her nail salon? Willow does it.
One thing Sloan spoke about during the interaction at NLF was the idea that writing multiple perspectives is a way of showing empathy. And slowly, as the story unfolds, we see this in Counting by 7s. Willow Chance has a narrative voice of her own, but a third-person narrator tells us about Dell and Mai and Quang-Ha. In the beginning, Dell, especially, does not understand Willow at all. But empathy builds slowly – in him for Willow, and in us for Dell. I love how it works!
Counting by 7s is a beautiful story about love and acceptance. At its core is the idea of embracing who you are, no matter how much of an oddball you may be.
| Title | Counting by 7s |
| Author | Holly Goldberg Sloan |
| Tags | Middle-Grade Fiction, Diverse, Multiple Perspectives |
| Rating (out of 5) | 4 |
| Age-group | 10+ |
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