This is another of the books for the Treehouse Book Club. This is a wonderful book. Twelve year old Willow Chance is a genius who is on the autism spectrum and has a problem with social skills. She has obsessive interests in plants and human diseases. Willow's coping mechanism is counting by sevens, her favorite number. Her adoptive parents are supportive of her interests but send her to middle school in hopes that it will improve her life. After finishing a standardized test in 17 minutes with a perfect score, she is accused of cheating and sent for weekly visits with a counselor who is more dysfunctional than she is. When her parents are killed in an auto accident (yes, she now has lost two sets of parents) Willow ends up temporarily with the family of her only friend, a teen-age girl whose brother is a client of the same counselor. But they live in a garage behind the small manicure shop owned by her friend's mother, a Vietnamese immigrant. The mother and daughter conspire to commandeer the counselor's apartment to make social services believe the temporary situation is adequate. In the end, the lives of Willow, her friends, the counselor, a friendly cab driver, and others in the community are changed in a myriad of ways. I enjoyed this book even more the second time around.
No comments:
Post a Comment