Willow Chance

Quick Facts

• Role: Protagonist and primary narrator of Counting by 7s; a 12-year-old prodigy whose voice frames the novel from the opening pages
• Identity: Adopted at birth; a self-described “person of color” who has long felt outside easy categories
• Passions: Botany, medicine, and patterns—especially the number seven
• Distinctive look: Small for her age; round, wire-rimmed glasses “like Gandhi”; long, curly dark hair often pulled back; a practical “uniform” of a khaki shirt, tan pants with kneepads, leather work boots, and a sun-red hat
• Turning point: The sudden death of her adoptive parents in a car accident
• Home after the tragedy: The foster system briefly, then an improvised household with a new circle that becomes family
• Core dynamic: An outsider whose order-seeking mind becomes the engine of communal renewal

Who They Are

At heart, Willow Chance is a pattern-finding genius who tries to make a complicated world legible. She builds order from chaos—through counting by sevens, cataloging medical conditions, and growing things that thrive under careful attention. A lifelong outsider, Willow’s story is not only about survival after catastrophe; it is about transforming difference into connection, turning isolation into influence, and embodying the book’s meditation on Difference and Acceptance.

Personality & Traits

Willow’s mind is remarkable and precise, but it’s her moral imagination—how she uses that mind for others—that defines her. She prefers “large talk” to small talk, sees what other people miss, and channels her obsessions into practical care: diagnosing ailments, reorganizing lives, and cultivating literal ground. Trauma briefly silences her, but it also reveals that her logic and empathy are two sides of the same urge: to repair what’s broken.

• Highly gifted: Perfects a statewide test score; learns Vietnamese in a week; carries an encyclopedic command of botany and medical conditions that she applies in real time.
• Hyper-observant and analytical: Notices skin anomalies on strangers; evaluates the structural integrity of spaces; reads systems—people, buildings, bureaucracies—like they’re puzzles to solve.
• Socially literal: Rejects small talk in favor of ideas; her factual, direct style can alienate peers, underscoring her isolation at school.
• Order-seeking and obsessive: Anchors herself in the repetition of sevens, medical taxonomy, and gardening routines; her garden is a sanctuary she can control.
• Resilient: Falls into near-catatonic grief after the accident but slowly reactivates—moving from silence to action as she takes on projects that require care, collaboration, and leadership.
• Empathetic in action: Helps strangers and near-strangers—spotting a taxi driver’s cancer, optimizing a struggling business, and even reordering a disorganized adult’s home—translating intellect into rescue.

Character Journey

Willow begins in a protected world: adored by her adoptive parents, she organizes life by data and ritual—counting by 7s, diagnosing, planting. The accident annihilates those patterns and plunges her into mute, suspended grief, the raw center of Grief, Loss, and Healing. When she enters the orbit of a new household, she first survives by observation, then re-enters life through service: tutoring, diagnosing, cleaning, planning. Her most visible act is to transform a bleak courtyard into a living garden, a public work that becomes the novel’s living emblem of Growth and Renewal. By the end, the girl who once counted alone becomes the nucleus of a Found Family and Community, discovering that true order is made with other people. In that shift—from solitary control to shared stewardship—Willow finally experiences durable Belonging and Human Connection.

Key Relationships

• Roberta and Jimmy Chance: Their unconditional acceptance gives Willow her first stable ecosystem. After their deaths, memory becomes both wound and anchor; their love remains the template Willow uses to recognize and cultivate love elsewhere.

• Mai Nguyen: Willow’s first true friend and protective interpreter of the social world. Mai meets Willow at her most fragile and treats her as a person, not a problem—offering companionship that lets Willow risk caring again; Willow, in turn, gives Mai purpose and intellectual partnership.

• Pattie Nguyen: A pragmatic caretaker whose discipline and resourcefulness create the scaffolding Willow needs. What begins as reluctant responsibility grows into profound mutual loyalty, culminating in legal guardianship that converts contingency into permanence.

• Dell Duke: A bumbling school counselor who initially reduces kids to categories. Willow upends his labels and his life; as she quietly systematizes his apartment and routines, he begins the awkward work of becoming the adult she—and others—actually need.

• Jairo Hernandez: A taxi driver whose life Willow saves with an on-the-spot medical observation. He reads her intervention as providence and responds with sustained, protective generosity—later standing beside Pattie to help formalize Willow’s new home.

• Quang-ha Nguyen: Initially guarded and resentful, he becomes a barometer of Willow’s quiet influence. Through tutoring and steady respect for his autonomy, Willow helps him re-engage with school and family; he, in turn, affirms her belonging by letting her into his world.

Defining Moments

Willow’s turning points chart her movement from being acted upon to acting for others. Each moment reframes her intellect as service and her grief as growth.

• Accused of cheating on a statewide test

  • Why it matters: Misread as dishonesty, Willow’s perfect score triggers counseling and introduces her to people who will become her new circle. The injustice underscores her outsider status while opening the door to connection.

• The officers’ visit announcing her parents’ deaths

  • Why it matters: The novel’s core trauma shatters her routines—she can no longer “count by 7s.” This collapse of order externalizes grief and sets the stage for a new, communal structure to replace her solitary systems.

• The search for Cheddar the cat

  • Why it matters: The first coordinated mission of Willow, two siblings, and an adult who barely qualifies as one. Shared purpose knits them into a proto-family and previews how Willow will lead through observation and persistence.

• Reclaiming the Gardens of Glenwood courtyard

  • Why it matters: Turning a rock-choked lot into a living garden literalizes Willow’s inner transformation. Her planning, planting, and delegating make private resilience public, rallying neighbors and embodying renewal.

• The custody hearing

  • Why it matters: When Pattie and Jairo step forward, the found family becomes legal fact. The hearing reverses Willow’s early powerlessness: she is no longer shuffled by a system but chosen, wanted, and home.

Essential Quotes

It’s possible that all labels are curses. Unless they are on cleaning products. Because in my opinion it’s not really a great idea to see people as one thing. Every person has lots of ingredients to make them into what is always a one-of-a-kind creation. We are all imperfect genetic stews.

Willow rejects the categorical thinking that has so often misread her. The wry humor (“cleaning products”) signals her precise, scientific voice while arguing for a human vision elastic enough to hold complexity—an ethic she will apply to herself and to the people she gathers.

I am a shadow. I no longer dream in color. I don’t count by 7s. Because in this new world I don’t count.

Here, counting—once her anchor—becomes a measure of absence. The color drains from her interior life, and with it the rituals that sustained her; the pun on “count” captures both arithmetic and worth, distilling grief into the loss of order and identity.

For someone grieving, moving forward is the challenge. Because after extreme loss, you want to go back.

Willow names the paradox of mourning: the pull toward the past versus the ethical demand to continue. The novel answers this dilemma by substituting restoration for return—she cannot go back, but she can rebuild, and she does so with others.

I think that at every stage of living, there are 7 people who matter in your world. They are people who are inside you. They are people you rely on. They are people who daily change your life.

Sevens become less a private coping mechanism and more a social geometry. By the end, the “people inside you” are the very ones she has helped transform—and who have transformed her—turning her signature number into a map of community.