Counting by 7s

Willow Chance is one of middle-grade fiction's genuinely original protagonists — a twelve-year-old prodigy who counts by sevens and talks to strangers about medical conditions — and Holly Goldberg Sloan gives her a story equal to her strangeness. When her adoptive parents die in a car accident, an unlikely community of a bumbling counselor, a Vietnamese American family, and a taxi driver coalesces around her. The book is funny in the way life sometimes is funny even in grief, and it celebrates multicultural found family without making a project of it. The New York Times bestseller and E.B. White Read-Aloud Honor nods are well earned. The parental death is early and central, so sensitive readers should know going in. Ages 9-13; entirely family-safe.