Today, I’m reviewing Counting by 7’s by Holly Goldberg Sloan. I’ve wanted to read this book for ages, but it wasn’t exactly what I expected. From all the reviews I’ve read for it, and the books it’s been compared to (Mockingbird by Katherine Erskine, Wonder by R. J. Pallacio, Out of my Mind by Sharon M. Draper), I admit that I was a little disappointed with how it turned out, but I could still see myself reading it again.

The main character, Willow, is this adopted, genius, vegetarian-gardener-lover-of-all-things-science twelve-year-old girl. She’s so, so, so intelligent, it’s insane. So she has a hard time expressing emotion or her feelings, and she doesn’t connect to other people very well. (She does, but let’s just say it’s not her strong suit.) At first, I thought Holly Goldberg Sloan would completely flip this stereotype, so that I would be able to understand Willow in a way the minor characters in the book couldn’t. (I still had an advantage on them. I was inside her head!) But I didn’t, not really. I almost didn’t finish this book because at times, Willow made me bored. She’s like a monotonous encyclopedia with legs. Even when she lost her parents (no spoilers, I promise!), she was… surprisingly calm. And it was unnerving to me, even if that’s her personality, or how someone like her would react.

I did really like that I got to read the perspective of the other characters in the book, even some of the adults. I honestly liked them better than Willow. I loved to watch how these characters changed because of Willow, despite the fact that my feelings for Willow didn’t change very much. I was really happy with the ending – but no tears were shed! (Much to my surprise!) 😉 I liked that there was just enough time into the book to get to know Willow’s parents and a love for them before Willow lost them. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I grew to love the people who helped Willow through her grief, even though they themselves didn’t know Willow for very long at all. It was heartwarming and made me really happy to think about people like those, who would help a child like that, no matter what it meant for them.

Counting by 7’s is a powerful story because it did make me think of all the people who would come together for a kid like Willow. From her case worker, to the school counselor, to the Vietnamese nail salon worker who only knew that Willow was a friend of her daughter’s and needed help. I’m actually doing an essay for school on why a character in a book should have helped this stranger in need, and it boils right down to the fact that at some point or another, we’re all going to need help. We all have been in situations where we need a friend to give us a hug, some more than others. And as I was reading this story, no matter how much Willow bothered me at times, I was thinking, “There are people I rather dislike in real life, but I have no idea what their life is like. I don’t know if their parents died, like Willow’s, or if they’re just having a bad day because they got a C on their math test. But if what they need is what I have to give, I should give it, even if it’s as simple as a hug.”

The adorableness of this book was overwhelming! 4 stars. 🙂

I just love cheap books. Especially because if I’ve never heard of them before, and I’m not expecting them to be good or bad, I can still get the book for two or three dollars. But when I saw The Other Half of my Heart, I knew it was going to be good. I also love books with a meaning behind their title, or cover, no matter how obvious it is. Obviously, The Other Half of my Heart is about friendship and family. And when I saw the cover, I knew it was about both… but also that a family doesn’t have to be one skin color.

This book really gave me some perspective in not only the struggle in race, but also the fact that these twins were born from the same mother and father, but one was black and one was white – and they both envy the other. I had seen twins like the main characters in the book, Minni and Keira, before – like Lucy and Maria or Kian and Remee, but I never thought about looking differently from my family, especially when it comes to the color of my skin.

I identify with White, or Caucasian, because that’s my skin tone, my heritage, the color of my family. I think kids from biracial, or “mixed” families have beautiful skin color, and I’m sure they are, and I certainly would be too, proud of their heritage. So it was a really neat perspective to read about two girls from a mixed family, with both White and Black heritage.

But then, even though they had both White and Black heritage, Minni was White and Kiera was Black. They didn’t look alike, they didn’t even look mixed, and people treated them differently. And then their grandmother wanted to enter the girls in a Miss Black Pearl Pageant. And that made Minni wonder if she was truly Black. Is the color of your skin determined by your heritage, or by your skin tone? People who saw Minni and didn’t know her mom and black and her dad was white assumed she was white, because her skin color was white. But Minni identified herself with black people as well, because she came from a partly black family.

This book really made me think of things I’d never really thought of before. I think everyone should read a book like this, because as a Christian, I know that we’re all brothers and sisters in Christ, and race shouldn’t matter, but in this world, to most people, it does, as unfortunate as it may be.

The Other Half of my Heart gets 5 stars!