What This Theme Explores
Growth and Renewal in Counting by 7s asks how people reassemble a life after it has been broken, and what conditions allow new beginnings to take root. The novel challenges the idea that healing is solitary or linear, showing instead a cyclical process that requires time, care, and community. It contrasts orderly, controlled growth with the messy vitality of collective rebuilding, suggesting that true renewal happens when individuals risk connection. Above all, it explores how grief can be composted into purpose, and how nurture—both given and received—turns survival into flourishing.
How It Develops
At the start, Willow Chance cultivates a private ecosystem in her backyard, a sanctuary where she can measure, predict, and control growth. Meanwhile, characters like Dell Duke and Jairo Hernandez are stuck in loops of inertia, their routines and physical spaces mirroring inner stagnation, as detailed in Chapter 5. The early world of the novel looks ordered on the surface but is emotionally dormant.
The sudden death of Willow’s parents stops movement entirely. Her silence and withdrawal are a fallow period—an emotional winter—while her presence becomes the catalyst that forces others to grow. Drawn into Willow’s crisis, Pattie Nguyen, Mai Nguyen, and Dell tentatively reorganize their lives to meet needs larger than their own. Small, practical acts—sharing a home, clearing clutter, buying seeds—function as first shoots of change, signaling a shift from isolated maintenance to shared caretaking.
By the end, private growth gives way to communal renewal. The barren apartment courtyard becomes a green, living space, and the group organizes itself around tending it. Quang-ha discovers creative purpose, Dell finds usefulness and pride, and Willow moves from survival to participation. The garden they build together is not just scenery; it is a collective promise that the future can be cultivated.
Key Examples
Moments across the novel trace the movement from controlled growth to communal renewal, showing how practical care becomes moral transformation.
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Willow’s first garden: Early in the story, her backyard functions like a laboratory where life can be managed and predicted. This controlled abundance reflects intellectual mastery but underscores her emotional solitude—growth without connection.
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The first seeds of hope: In Chapter 40, Dell’s small gesture of buying sunflower seeds meets Willow at the edge of her grief. Her willingness to plant again signals a shift from stasis to tentative engagement, and the scale of the act—tiny seeds—emphasizes how modest care can unlock profound change.
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Cleaning Dell’s apartment: The group’s overhaul in Chapter 32 literalizes renewal as they discard trash, order chaos, and make space for new life. This physical reset mirrors their internal reorientation: they are no longer coping alone, but constructing a shared home.
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The courtyard transformation: Beginning in Chapter 46, the ugly, rock-littered lot becomes a flourishing garden through collective work. This project externalizes their healing—what was neglected becomes tended, and what was barren sustains—and gives the group a common purpose that binds them into something like family.
Character Connections
Willow anchors the theme. Her early brilliance grows in isolation, but tragedy forces a period of dormancy that she survives only because others choose to care for her. When she initiates new planting and contributes ideas to the courtyard, she accepts that growth must be shared, not controlled—renewal comes from belonging as much as from knowledge.
Dell undergoes the most visible metamorphosis. Initially apathetic and disorganized, he discovers the moral weight of responsibility through proximity to need. His decision to start running in Chapter 43 externalizes his inward shift: he substitutes avoidance with discipline, and passivity with momentum, becoming a steward of place and people rather than a spectator.
Quang-ha Nguyen begins sullen and oppositional, but the design work for the garden and skylight channels his resistance into artistry. Recognized for his eye and ideas, he transitions from troublemaker to contributor, showing how capability blooms when someone’s gifts are seen and needed.
Jairo, sparked by his encounter with Willow, redirects the trajectory of his life, enrolling in college to become a medical technician as seen in Chapter 13. His pivot demonstrates that renewal often arrives as a response to being witnessed, and that purpose can be planted by a brief but meaningful connection. Pattie and Mai, too, stretch into new roles—Pattie as a decisive, resourceful guardian and Mai as a sister who advocates—showing how caregiving grows agency as well as attachment.
Symbolic Elements
Gardens: Willow’s backyard represents order, control, and solitary competence, while the apartment garden embodies collaborative growth and imperfect, shared stewardship. Together they chart a movement from private resilience to communal regeneration and a living architecture of found family.
Seeds and cuttings: The lucky acorn, sunflower seeds, and plant cuttings embody potential—small, portable vessels of future life. Their fragility requires care, turning characters into caretakers; their eventual flourishing validates the risk of beginning again.
Dell’s apartment: Initially a hoard of inertia, the space reads as a map of his inner stagnation. Its transformation into a clean, functional home mirrors the group’s psychic de-cluttering and the conscious choice to make room—physically and emotionally—for one another.
Contemporary Relevance
In an era marked by loss, dislocation, and burnout, the novel’s insistence that healing is communal feels both urgent and practical. It argues that progress often begins with modest acts—sweeping a room, planting a seed, showing up again—and that structure and ritual can cradle grief until it softens into purpose. Counting by 7s offers a hopeful model for building support systems across difference, reminding readers that renewal is not a miracle but a practice: sustained attention, shared labor, and the courage to trust new roots.
Essential Quote
So where once our house had a rectangle of grass, there is now a forty-foot-high stand of timber bamboo. I have citrus trees (orange, grapefruit, and lime) next to my year-round vegetable garden. I grow grapes, a variety of vines, annual and perennial flowers, and, in one small area, tropical plants. To know me is to know my garden. — Chapter 2
This passage establishes gardening as Willow’s identity and vocabulary for life, foreshadowing how growth will become the novel’s grammar for change. The meticulous inventory signals control and isolation, making later communal cultivation feel like a radical redefinition of “me” into “we.” By the end, to know Willow is to know not just her garden, but the community that tends it with her.