Counting by 7s and Families with a Missing Piece

Counting by 7s and Families with a Missing Piece 

One of the Essential Questions that my group and I had was to see what had caused the accident that made Willow’s parents died. In the beginning of the book Willow is seen with her friends and Dell Duke. They arrive at Willow’s house and find out that her parents have died. “There’s been an accident.” And after that in whispers comes out the news that the two people I love most in the world are gone forever.” Pg.8 Showing how Willow’s parents have died in an accident. But it is not mentioned on how they died or what had caused the accident, until later on in the book. Where it is revealed that Willow’s parents have died in a car accident. “... he stepped on the accelerator believing he could just glide right through the red signal. Jimmy died on the scene but was still put into an ambulance and taken to the hospital with his wife. Roberta stopped breathing three hours later during emergency surgery.” Pg. 104 Which answered one of the Essential questions we had. The outcome wasn't what I had expected. Since the officers were at the house I thought someone had murdered them. Sadly my group and I found out what had caused the accident.

I found an article titled "Families with a Missing Piece" by Hello Grief and noticed that it related to Willow Chance from the book titled Counting by 7s. First of all In the article one man shares his story on how he lost his mother at a very young age. According to the article "Families with a Missing Piece it says"  “Gary Jahnke, 31, of Hastings, Minn. was 13 when his mother died of cancer. “I gave up on my good grades and drooped out of high school.” As you can see this man lost his mother at a very young age just like Willow whom lost her parents at age 12. Both Willow and Gary dropped out of school and were depressed for some time. In the book Counting by 7s it says “The next morning Willow told Mai that she wasn’t going to school. She didn’t say “ever again,” but Mai thought that’show it sounded.” Pg.130 As you can clearly see, Willow and Gary both had stopped going to school and had shut out the world around them for awhile. These are some ways that the article and book are similar to one another.

Even though I found similarities between Willow and the article, I also found differences. One of these differences is that Willow lost her parents to a car accident while the parents in the article commit suicide or die due to cancer. According to the article it says “He lost both his parents to cancer before he was 13.” This article has many stories of kids losing their kids to cancer. According to the article it said “Children whose parents commit suicide, for instance, are three times as likely to commit suicide later on in their lives.” As you can see Willow lost her parents due to a car accident while in the article most of the kids loose their parents to cancer or suicide. As well as Willow didn’t commit suicide and kept living. While in the article it says that most of the kids commit suicide later on in their life. These are some of the ways that the article and the book are different.


MLA: Sloan, Holly Goldberg. Counting by 7s. NY, NY: Puffin , an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), 2014. Print. 

"FAmilies with a Missing Piece ." Hello Grief. 2010. Accessed May 11, 2017. http://www.hellogrief.org/families-with-a-missing-piece/.