While reading Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan, I was immediately struck by the rich detail with which protagonist Willow 
Chance describes the world as seen through her 12 year old eyes. Willow, a genius who attends Sequoia Middle School in Bakersfield,California, goes to the mall not to buy things but to collect field notes and make diagnostic flash cards on skin disorders. Besides medical conditions, Willow is obsessed with the number seven, plants, and order. Rather than engage in small talk, Willow prefers “talk of theories and concepts mixed with facts and known quantities” (89). Her favorite color is red.
These interests and abilities alienate Willow from her peers, making school an educational misadventure and marking her as a misfit. When she is accused of cheating to earn a perfect score on the school district’s standardized test, she is sentenced to counseling with Dell Duke, who “is not a bad person. He is just bad at being a person” (290). Despite the near ineptitude of the man, it is here that Willow meets Mai Nguyen. Born in the year of the dragon—which means “nobility and power and strength” (69)—Mai is cheeky, convincing, authoritative, determined, and deliberate in everything she does. With this fourteen year old who excels at organizing people, Willow forms an almost immediate connection.
For Willow, who has a passion for growing things, her garden is a sanctuary. With plants she finds affirmation, solace, and reverence since “[Plants] communicate with color and shape and size and texture” (14) and have the power to adapt, survive, and flourish—all characteristics Willow must draw on when both of her parents are killed in a car accident and all order disappears from Willow’s universe.
The accident incapacitates Willow, who weeps incessantly and wants to loudly scream until her throat ruptures. She suffers from a grief so oppressive and overwhelming that she falls into a deep depression and lives in a world of pain, where “the deepest form of pain comes out as silence” (176). It takes seven people to rescue Willow, and each one serves as an important link in the chain that anchors Willow from drowning in despair. Plants–like people– thrive when there is balance, and these seven provide an essential stabilizing force inWillow’s turbulent life. After three months in numb detachment, the magnificent seven–along with sunflowers, exercise, a lucky acorn, and pink shoes with purple laces– restore Willow’s hope as she adjusts to her new reality.
If this book is anything, it is a story about coping with loss and about how we all need attachments and a sense of purpose to survive.
- Posted by Donna