Holly Goldberg Sloan’s Counting by 7s maps the aftermath of sudden loss onto a landscape of unlikely kinship, small acts of care, and the slow work of growing again. At the story’s center is a child whose world fractures—and around her, ordinary people who remake a home from compassion and choice. Together, they show how grief can be carried, difference embraced, and community built from mismatched parts.
Major Themes
Found Family and Community
The novel’s emotional engine is the creation of a chosen home: Found Family and Community. After tragedy, strangers knit themselves into a functional household not by obligation but by sustained care, invention, and sacrifice. This improvised family becomes a structure stronger than circumstance, redefining family as a daily practice of showing up.
Grief, Loss, and Healing
Grief, Loss, and Healing unfolds as a nonlinear, destabilizing process that interrupts language, appetite, and routine. The book refuses neat timelines; instead, it renders healing as communal and incremental—rooted in patient presence, purposeful work, and renewed attention to the living world. Recovery doesn’t erase sorrow; it reframes it within new bonds and rhythms.
Belonging and Human Connection
Belonging and Human Connection argues that belonging is earned through commitment, not sameness. A gifted outsider who once hovered at the margins becomes the nucleus of a shared life, and the very dependencies produced by crisis turn into durable attachment. The novel suggests that people become “ours” by acts of constancy—cleaning a room, planting a bed, making a seat in the car.
Supporting Themes
Difference and Acceptance
Difference and Acceptance reframes oddity as resource. Early attempts to label and contain “strangeness” crumble as characters meet each other in specificity rather than category. As quirks are recognized—not corrected—acceptance becomes the precondition for found family and the path to real belonging.
Growth and Renewal
In Growth and Renewal, the garden is both refuge and roadmap: barren ground becomes a designed ecosystem through attention, time, and shared labor. Seed-to-bloom cycles mirror the arc from shock to reengagement, making renewal tangible. Cultivation turns abstract hope into work one can do with one’s hands.
Kindness and Compassion
Kindness and Compassion shows how modest gestures compound into life-changing commitments. A ride, a spare key, a temporary bed—each small choice widens into guardianship, responsibility, and love. Compassion is less sentiment than practice, the catalyst that starts the family that then sustains healing.
Theme Interactions
Grief isolates; kindness interrupts that isolation; community sustains the interruption. In Counting by 7s, themes interlock like steps in a relay, each handing the baton to the next until a new life takes shape.
- Kindness and Compassion → Found Family and Community → Belonging and Human Connection: An initial act of care triggers a durable network where each person gains a role and a place.
- Difference and Acceptance ↔ Belonging and Human Connection: True belonging requires being seen as oneself; acceptance transforms “outsiders” into indispensable members.
- Growth and Renewal ⇄ Grief, Loss, and Healing: The garden externalizes mourning’s movement—from fallow to flourishing—while acknowledging cycles of withering and return.
- Found Family and Community ⇄ Grief, Loss, and Healing: The family holds the weight grief alone cannot carry, and grief, in turn, deepens and tests the family’s bonds.
- Productive tension: dependence vs. autonomy; labels vs. individuality; improvisation vs. stability. The novel resolves these not by choosing sides but by balancing them within daily care.
Character Embodiment
Willow Chance concentrates the novel’s grief and its renewal. A prodigy whose inner order collapses after loss, she becomes both the catalyst and the beneficiary of found family. Her turn from counting to cultivating embodies healing as patient, observable growth.
Pattie Nguyen personifies compassion translated into structure. Her practical, sometimes impulsive care anchors the chosen household, proving that kindness paired with persistence builds durable community and confers belonging.
Dell Duke charts the journey from categorizer to caretaker. His failed labels yield to relationship, illustrating difference transformed by acceptance, and his new responsibilities give him purpose within the communal whole.
Jairo Hernandez models how small mercies scale into guardianship. His steady presence widens the circle of support, demonstrating kindness as the initiating force behind found family and ongoing renewal.
Mai Nguyen bridges solitude and connection. Through quiet competence and cultural empathy, she nurtures belonging, showing how seeing and being seen reorients a person toward community.
Quang-ha Nguyen embodies reluctant growth. His resistance gives way to investment, revealing how acceptance of one’s own rough edges—and others’—opens the door to purpose within the group.