Title: Counting By 7s

Author: Holly Goldberg Sloan

Ranking: ★☆☆☆☆

Plot Summary: The description of the book on the author’s website reads, “Counting By 7s is the story of Willow Chance, a twelve-year-old girl who has been identified at an early age as ‘gifted’. Willow lives in Bakersfield, California and comes home from school one day to the news that her parents have been killed in a traffic accident. What follows is Willow’s search to find a place where she belongs. In equal parts an exploration of the pain of loss and of the triumph of moving forward, the novel looks at how one person can change the lives of many, often without even trying.”

Praise:

This is a story about unexpected friendships and the power of relationships. Willow Chance is an exceptional child who sees the world differently and enriches the lives of everyone she encounters. The plot attempts to promote a message of empathy and non-judgmentalness, as all of the main characters learn and evolve from their original positions.

The book features a diverse and multicultural cast who comprise the main characters. Willow is described ambiguously as a “person of color” who was transracially adopted by two white parents. The book uses a number of vague adjectives to describe Willow, including “highly gifted,” “different (as in strange), and a genius,” through which the reader is likely to assume that Willow is neurodivergent and on the Autism spectrum. Pattie, Mai, and Quang-ha Nguyen are a multiracial Vietnamese family. Sadhu Kumar, a neighbor in the Gardens of Glenview apartment complex, is Indian. And Jairo is a Mexican man. Unfortunately, this aspect of the book that should be praiseworthy is simultaneously a problematic element because nearly all of the characters are presented as stereotypes.

Criticism (includes spoilers):

Ethnic/Racial Presentation:

The book aims to present such a diverse cast that none of the characters’ identities are portrayed with depth or in meaningful ways. Jairo is a Mexican taxi driver who needs Willow’s encouragement to go to college. Sadhu is an Indian man who works with computers and eats spicy food. Though Sadhu’s citizenship or immigration status is not discussed in the book, the narrator of the audiobook perpetuated the forever foreigner stereotype with this Asian character by reading Sadhu’s lines in heavily accented English. Similarly, Pattie’s dialogue is written in non-standardized syntax, and the same narrator puts on a noticeable Vietnamese accent for these lines. Aligned with stereotypes of Vietamese women, Pattie operates a nail salon, where she uses unhygienic practices until Willow intervenes. Pattie’s Black heritage is never mentioned again after her initial introduction when the author notes that she was fathered by a Black American soldier. The multiracial identity of Pattie’s children, Mai and Quang-ha, who have a Mexican father, is also neglected in the book. The superficiality of the racial presentation of these characters signals an awareness of the need for multicultural characters in children’s literature without a commitment to truly portraying the complexity of multiraciality. In fact, the author uses the word “exotic” to describe Mai in chapter 10, which problematically otherizes both Asians and mixed race people.

Willow, herself, is depicted as an ethnically vague “person of color” with parents who are “two of the whitest white people in the world.” Colorblindness permeates Willow’s words when she says, “While I don’t in any way resemble my parents, somehow we just naturally look like a family. At least I think so. And that’s all that really matters.” The book does not mention any cultural socialization activities or ethnic communities of belonging Willow’s parents sought out for her or any racialized experiences Willow has had at school, with friends, or within her extended white family. At the same time, readers can assume that Willow’s racial identity is important to her because she wants the judge who will “take legal responsibility for [her]” to be a “woman and person of color who sees [her] and understands that [she’s] different.” This discrepancy in Willow’s thoughts is important because creating and living in a family that crosses racial and biological ties is a complicated phenomenon that deserved more attention, since the author chose to make Willow a child of color and a transracial adoptee. Aside from a couple of brief moments (like asking for a WOC judge and seeking out Mai because she also appeared ethnically ambiguous), I often forgot that Willow was supposed to be a person of color.

Finally, Dell Duke is the only main character whose race is not identified by the author; however he is frequently read as a white character. The silence around his race while naming everyone else’s race perpetuates hierarchies of power that position white people as “the nondefined definers of other people” (Frankenberg, 2003, p. 102). Even though the vast majority of the protagonists are people of color, whiteness in this book is still the unstated default, neutral, in which everyone else must be labeled “different.”

Depiction of Social Services:

The depiction of social services in this book ranges from disregard to total disrespect. Dell Duke, the school counselor, is depicted as a broke, incapable, lazy, unintelligent, and a downright unethical person. Despite a distaste for children and emotions, he simply falls into his career in the social services because he wasn’t intelligent enough for the hard sciences in college. Rather than relying on standardized diagnostic tools like the DSM, Dell Duke employs his own categorization system called the “Dell Duke System of the Strange,” in which he labels people as “misfit, oddball, lone wolf, weirdo, genius, dictator, or mutant.” Dell Duke’s ethical incompetencies become even more apparent as he neglects his responsibility of monitoring Willow’s homework while she is out of school (and no one else at school seems to care that she is absent for months either) and when Willow, Mai, Quang-ha, and Pattie end up living in Dell Duke’s apartment, eradicating boundaries between the counselor and his students.

In the process of moving Willow and the Nguyen family into Dell Duke’s apartment, readers learn that Dell Duke is a hoarder with a wall of hundreds of dirty, unwashed underwear. This “mountain of underwear” along with Dell Duke’s weight are a running jokes throughout the book. His character perpetuates harmful stereotypes of fatness as a character flaw paired with other negative traits like laziness and a lack of discipline, that are all resolved at the end. He begins to take responsibility for his apartment by being the building representative and addresses his health by beginning to exercise. Despite Dell Duke’s role as the counselor, his life ultimately receives more intervention from Willow than he provides to her.

The other service providers Willow sees play minor roles in the book. Willow visits a psychiatrist, Dr. Ron McDevitt, at least three times in the weeks immediately following her parents’ death, despite her not seeing a grief therapist first and despite her not showing signs of psychiatric or behavioral symptoms that would require medical intervention from a psychiatrist. She meets with a grief counselor only once, about two months after the accident. This appointment happens so late in the book that the majority of Willow’s growth has already occurred and she realizes that she’s “not afraid. Of anything. ANYMORE.” This depiction of closure does not align with adolescent grief, where two months post-death would still mark the beginning of processing such a significant loss rather than a resolution.

The permanency process, which is a central plot point, reads as if the author does not truly understand foster care. On the day Willow’s parents die, she goes to a central facility that provides emergency foster care, which she describes as a place “for kids who have parents who hit them or don’t feed them real food because they are too busy taking drugs or stealing something.” Willow contrasts her situation with this very stereotypical judgment about families involved in child welfare systems to position herself as superior to the other youth in the facility. After ending up in the hospital, Willow is able to leave the facility and stay with the Nguyen family after they deceive Lenore Cole, Willow’s social worker, by moving into Dell Duke’s apartment.

Later in the book Willow says, “There’s been talk of permanent placement in foster care, but it’s not easy finding spots for older kids.” As a former child welfare worker, my conclusion upon reading this was that the author did not know the difference between a “permanency plan” and “permanent placement in foster care.” A permanency plan is created for all children who enter foster care and most often consists of reunification with birth family, adoption, or legal guardianship as permanency goals because foster care is supposed to be temporary. While it’s true that it’s much harder to find adoptive homes for older children, there is virtually no chance that a healthy 12-year-old child’s goal immediately upon entering foster care would be aging out.

About three months after her parents die, Willow gets an unexpected visit from the social worker and learns that her permanency hearing in court is the very next day. Lenore, the social worker, tells her that she is going to be placed permanently in a group home. Willow is devastated because she has to leave the small community of people who have supported her since her parents’ death. Lenore acknowledges that “transitions are important,” but ambushes Willow with a plan to immediately move her, providing her with no time to process this transition. Displaying zero sensitivity toward Willow’s situation or trauma awareness, the social worker simply tells her, “It’s time to move on.”

The next day, the judge surprises Lenore and Willow by announcing that Jairo and Pattie Nguyen have filed a petition to the court and are seeking custody of Willow as partners. Readers then learn that Jairo and Pattie have been secretly dating for the past two months and that Pattie is secretly wealthy, despite living in a garage. These plot twists provide an uncomplicated conclusion that neatly wraps up the book’s plot but are very unrealistic from a child welfare perspective. A last-minute guardian petition wouldn’t simply emerge as a surprise at court because an entirely new permanency plan would need to be written by the social worker and presented to the judge well in advance. Additionally, Pattie and Jairo would never be approved to pursue joint guardianship together if they started dating just a couple of months before. The couple don’t live together, hardly know each other, and have done no foster parent training. Though U.S. foster care systems certainly have a plethora of challenges, unserious depictions like the one presented in this book undermine the significance and reasoning for policies that are in place.

Depiction of Adoption:

There are essentially two out-of-home placement stories to dissect because the book begins with the death of Willow’s adoptive parents and ends with Pattie and Jairo taking custody of Willow. As for the first adoption story, there is no reason for Willow to be an adoptee besides the dramatic impact of a child losing not only one but two sets of parents. Adoption is presented as a second-choice solution to infertility that was decided “within 10 minutes” for Willow’s adoptive parents. The plot of the book hinges on the idea that Willow’s adoptive parents had no emergency plan for her and had absolutely no extended family members or family friends who could care for Willow. When I worked in public adoptions, I was required to ask prospective adoptive parents for their short-term and longterm plans if something should happen, and I would have been extremely hesitant to place a child with a couple who shared that they had no support community whatsoever.

The words “birth parent” or “birth family” don’t appear at all in the book, meaning that Willow does not share a single thought about who her birth parents are, how her story began (aside from her adoptive mother’s infertility), or any questions or musings about her biological heritage. Birth parent erasure is a common weakness in adoption literature but seems even more apparent in this book given that Willow is such an inquisitive, perceptive child who attempted to find her adoptive father’s missing brother when she was 10 and has a “passion for all things medical.” When recounting the medical fate of various adoptive family members, Willow says, “thinking about the kinfolk (her adoptive family) health histories was the only time I found comfort in being adopted.” Yet as someone with an “obsession” with medical conditions, she has no reflections on what her own missing family medical history means for her and her future.

After Willow learns that her parents have died, she goes to the library and attempts to find literature about losing a parent. When nothing satisfactory turns up, she recommends that the library add materials for young people on the loss of parents, somberly noting, “despite my own situation, I do not believe that there is a large enough need for useful information about losing two parents twice.” After this comment, Willow doesn’t articulate any thoughts that might differentiate parental loss for an adopted child versus a child whose life had not already begun with a prior parental loss. In contrast to what I would expect from having extra layers of loss, abandonment, trauma, and “orphan status” to process, Willow’s obsessive compulsions actually improve after the death of her adoptive parents.

Just one month after the accident, while Willow is living in Dell Duke’s apartment with the Nguyens, Willow says, “I’m here on a temporary basis, but each day gives me more time to adjust to my new reality. So I need to be grateful. That’s what I’m working on.” This chipper and uplifting comment reads like the author wants Willow to be a 21st Century Anne of Green Gables – an odd but delightful orphan girl who creates an unconventional family for herself all while staying optimistic. The word “grateful” appears four times in the book and reinforces the harmful expectation that adoptees should be grateful for the circumstances of their lives and perpetually indebted to other people’s generosity. Willow even tries to repay Pattie and Dell Duke monetarily for caring for her, thinking of it as “a reverse allowance.”

The book concludes with Pattie and Jairo seeking joint custody of Willow, which is unrealistic for the aforementioned reasons. The revelation that Pattie is secretly wealthy suddenly shifts the story into a rags-to-riches Annie trope where Pattie is a Black/Vietnamese Daddy Warbucks. This plot twist came as a shock because Pattie is depicted as so poor that she and her children live in a garage, and many of her son’s behavioral issues seem to be linked to their living situation. Pattie is simultaneously shown to be an extremely caring woman, which makes it hard to believe she wouldn’t try to improve conditions for her children if she was able this whole time.

One notable aspect of the book is that it does not end with adoption but with the granting of guardianship, though many readers may conflate the two. The distinction is significant because guardianship is a form of permanency that allows Willow to remain legally connected to her deceased adoptive parents, avoiding the implication that her parents are being replaced. However, the author does not meaningfully engage the legal or emotional differences between adoption and guardianship or explain why this arrangement was selected. As a result, legal resolution comes to symbolize emotional resolution for Willow, in which the formation of Willow’s new family leaves her at ease enough to end the book with the phrase, “life goes on,” just three months after her parents die. The book’s conclusion risks implying that legal permanency is an endpoint that resolves trauma rather than being the beginning or, for Willow, the continuation of a lifelong process that creates its own questions, mournings, and challenges after legal proceedings have ended.

Recommendation:

Counting By 7s fits within the genre of a “pro-adoption,” feel-good story that rightfully counters notions of biocentrism within the realm of family but does so at the expense of reality. While there is superficial mention of many important topics, the book fails to portray trauma-informed complexities related to parental bereavement, transracial adoption, foster care systems, multiraciality and neurodivergence — all of which are systems and experiences real-life 12 year olds are navigating on a daily basis. Though this book has received multiple awards, I cannot recommend Counting By 7s to adoptees or fosterees who are looking for literature that will resonate.