Counting by 7s
Holly Goldberg Sloan (2013)
“A twelve-year-old genius loses everything and discovers that the family you build can be stronger than the one you were born into.”
Counting by 7s— Historical Context & Author Background
Author: Holly Goldberg Sloan · Published 2013· Era: Contemporary·378 pages
Themes explored: grief, found-family, genius, diversity, resilience
About Holly Goldberg Sloan
Holly Goldberg Sloan is a screenwriter-turned-novelist who has written films for Warner Bros. and Disney. She turned to children's fiction with I'll Be There (2011) and followed it with Counting by 7s, which became her breakout novel. Sloan has spoken about being inspired by children who do not fit conventional social or educational categories — the ones institutions cannot accommodate. She lives in Santa Monica, California.
Life → Text Connections
How Holly Goldberg Sloan's real experiences shaped specific elements of Counting by 7s.
Sloan's background in screenwriting gave her a multi-perspective storytelling technique unusual in middle-grade fiction
The novel shifts between Willow, Mai, Dell, and Jairo's perspectives, creating a polyphonic narrative
The multiple viewpoints prevent the story from being only about Willow's grief — they make it about a community's formation.
Sloan has described Bakersfield, California — the novel's setting — as a place often overlooked, neither glamorous nor picturesque
The novel is deliberately set in an unglamorous city, among working-class and immigrant families
The setting insists that found family happens everywhere, not just in photogenic locations. The ordinariness is the point.
Sloan has spoken about knowing children in the foster care system and being struck by the gap between institutional process and individual need
The novel's treatment of foster care — well-intentioned but systematically unable to see individuals
Sloan writes from observation rather than abstraction, which gives the institutional critique specificity.
Historical Era
Contemporary America — foster care system, immigrant communities, neurodivergence awareness
How the Era Shapes the Book
The novel is set in a contemporary America where institutions — schools, foster care, counseling — are designed for average cases and fail exceptional ones. Willow's genius, her adoption, her grief, and her neurodivergence all push her outside institutional categories. The found family that rescues her is built from people who are themselves outside those categories: immigrants, underemployed counselors, taxi drivers. Sloan argues that the people institutions overlook are precisely the ones who build the most resilient communities.
Why Counting by 7s Matters Historically
Became one of the most widely read middle-grade novels of the 2010s. Praised for its representation of neurodivergence, its multicultural cast, and its refusal to sentimentalize grief. Used extensively in schools to teach empathy, diversity, and the concept of found family. Named to numerous state reading lists and best-of-year lists.
- One of the first major middle-grade novels to center a neurodivergent protagonist without labeling her with a specific diagnosis
- Pioneered a multi-perspective structure in middle-grade grief narratives
- Among the first widely read children's novels to center a Vietnamese-American family without making ethnicity the primary plot
Not widely banned or challenged. Occasional concerns about the depiction of parental death and the foster care system, but generally embraced by schools and libraries.