A good juvenile-fiction tale of a likely neurodivergent girl, though weighed down by an oddly socialist subplot

If you see a book called Counting by 7’s—with a cover showing a single red fish swimming against a school of blue fish—and read that it’s about a strange, brilliant girl, you can probably guess it’s a story about someone on the autism spectrum. The book never labels Willow Chance as autistic, and she doesn’t fully meet the criteria for autism, but she is clearly neurodivergent. She’s a twelve-year-old genius with intense interests and a socially awkward manner, though without the significant communication challenges characteristic of autism.

The story opens with devastating news: Willow’s parents die in a car crash. From there, the book flashes back two months, showing her life with her parents and her unique way of seeing the world. One day she aces a standardized test that almost no one ever gets a perfect score on and is accused of cheating. That’s how she ends up in the poorly run office of a school counselor, where she meets a Vietnamese girl named Mia. The two become close friends, and Willow even learns Vietnamese—surprisingly fast.

After Willow’s parents die, Mia’s mother Pattie takes her in temporarily. Pattie owns a nail salon, and the family lives in the garage behind it. Because Child Protective Services would consider the garage inadequate, Pattie moves her family—and Willow—into the counselor’s two-bedroom apartment, pushing him to stay with someone else in the building who needs a roommate. During this time, Willow begins growing a garden, mirroring her emotional rebirth after a long period of shock and grief. In the end, Pattie files for adoption, revealing that despite living in a garage, she has saved an enormous amount of cash and now plans to buy the entire apartment complex.

Overall, the book is engaging and filled with well-drawn characters. Willow’s portrayal as a gifted, likely neurodivergent girl with distinct interests feels accurate. Still, certain aspects could have been handled differently. For example, I personally would have preferred Willow to be explicitly autistic rather than portrayed as simply a quirky genius. But it’s hard to imagine the story working in the same way if she had the communication barriers common to autism; she might not have bonded as easily with her new makeshift family or advocated so effectively for herself. Additionally, the story is already emotionally heavy—the death of both parents might have been too overwhelming if paired with a more severe disability. A single surviving parent or an absent parent might have balanced the emotional weight better.

There are also plot elements that feel unlikely. Willow’s rapid mastery of Vietnamese, for one. A genius child might pick up Spanish or Swedish quickly, but Vietnamese—being non-Indo-European and tonal—is notoriously difficult even for gifted learners.

The most implausible and troubling plot point, however, is Pattie taking over the counselor’s apartment. By the end, we learn she had money all along, so she easily could have rented her own place instead of forcing someone out of theirs because she decided he didn’t “need” two bedrooms. That veers into a kind of soft socialism—determining how others should live based on personal judgment. I say this as a liberal who supports some socialist principles, but not the kind that dictate how much space someone deserves. It’s also ironic considering many Vietnamese families in the U.S. fled socialist regimes where the government decided who was entitled to what property. Yet Pattie exhibits that exact behavior.

As an autistic person who forms attachments to objects, I didn’t like how the counselor’s belongings were treated as disposable clutter or how his needs were ignored. He himself seems mildly on the spectrum, and I would never want to be forced into living with a short-tempered roommate who dictates what I can or can’t cook in the kitchen. A more satisfying ending would have had Pattie moving into her own unit once she could afford it, allowing the counselor to return to his original apartment and giving every character dignity rather than forcing one to give up his space.