Counting by 7s Study Guide

Holly Goldberg Sloan was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to a father who was a professor in the field of personality psychology and a mother who worked as an architect. Sloan started out working in advertising in New York City but soon moved to Los Angeles and sold her first screenplay at age 24. She has written several screenplays since then, including Made in America, Angels in the Outfield, and The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course. She has also written and directed The Big Green and The Secret Life of Girls. Sloan published her debut young adult novel I’ll Be There in 2011 and has since written several more young adult and middle grade novels, including the bestselling Counting by 7s in 2013. Sloan lives in California and recently published her first novel for adult audiences, Pieces of Blue, in 2023.

Counting by 7s takes place in roughly modern-day California, and it attempts to capture the multicultural nature of a region where no ethnic group makes up the majority. The central characters come from a wide range of backgrounds, such as Pattie (Vietnamese), Jairo (Mexican), and Dell (Greek).Willow’s own ethnicity, meanwhile, is never specified. In some ways, the novel’s diverse cast of characters reflects the optimism that then-President Barack Obama promised during his presidential campaigns—some believed that election of the first Black president in the United States might signify the beginning of greater harmony between people of different races and cultures across the country. Additionally, given Willow’s strong interest in medical diagnoses, it’s noteworthy that she doesn’t diagnose herself or anyone else in the novel with a mental health condition such as autism, ADHD, OCD, depression. This could reflect the beliefs of the neurodiversity movement, a relatively recent subset of the disability rights movement that claims that many so-called mental “disorders” or “diseases” should not be stigmatized with negative language and can even be sources of pride. While the novel is not specifically about disability rights, it similarly avoids any mental health language that could be interpreted as stigmatizing. By the novel’s conclusion, Willow takes pride in her own atypical ways of thinking, and the school’s attempts to “cure” the behavior of her, Mai, and Quang-ha ultimately just isolates them from the other students.

As a novel about social issues narrated by a precocious girl, Counting by 7s loosely follows the same format as Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Although frequently taught in schools and read by younger readers, Lee’s novel slightly predates the establishment of young adult (approximately ages 12 to 18) and middle grade (ages 8 to 12) as distinct categories in the publishing industry, with Counting by 7s falling into this latter group. Two more recent inspirations for the novel may have been Wonder by R. J. Palacio and Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper, both of with also deal with tween protagonists who face ostracism because of how they differ from their peers but who overcome their challenges to inspire people around them. Counting by 7s is also noteworthy for being a novel about adoption. Adoption has long been a major theme in books aimed at children, with some of the most popular examples being Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery, A Little Princess and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Heidi by Johanna Spyri.