Counting by 7s

Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan  378 pp.

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.

Crazy by Han Nolan 348 pages

15 year old Jason has a lot of problems. Since his mother's death, he is responsible for his dad who has few lucid moments. So, he skips school a lot trying to keep his father under control. It is all too easy for his dad to escape the house or forget to turn off the stove. With non-existent funds, his house is one step from being condemned. It has major leaks, is filthy and the heat is off. Jason is forced to attend lunchtime counseling sessions and this becomes his salvation. They listen and pitch in to help and when it becomes too much for him to bear, they report him to family services. And throughout the book, Jason hears voices and worries that he might inherit his father's madness. While this could have been very dark, there is the element of hope that lifts this book. It is hard to imagine how one would handle Jason's burdens.