On Friday I rode the bus to work and when I got downtown I was getting close to the end of Counting by 7s, by Holly Goldberg Sloan. I tried to get my usual mile of walking in, but it started raining, and I ended up at McDonald’s, eating breakfast and finishing the book and crying over my coffee and potato triangle. It was just so awesome. I was forty minutes late to work.

The experience was similar to reading The Fault In Our Stars, in that I’m blowing my nose and saying, “it’s, sooooo, gooo-ooo-oood!” and at the same time my brain is working over some things that are maybe not that good.

Like, the treatment of the guidance counselor is such an odd comic note. The realism of the book in general seems to fluctuate wildly. And although I love the majority-POC cast, in the end I found the Nguyen family underdeveloped. There’s a reveal about the mom at the end, and if I had been the daughter, I would have been like, WHAT? And why had the mom made the decisions she did all along? But the book is so focused on our heroine that it was let slide. The Nguyens didn’t feel stereotyped to me, emotionally, but in the absence of more context about them, some stereotypes are the best available explanation for some things about them.

Anyway, if you’ve read this book, I’d love to know if the tone and point of view worked for you, and if it made you bawl in a McDonalds or anything. By the way, I also loved it because there’s housecleaning!