Up until now, I’ve only talked about classic literature for the literature section of the blogs. So, today I wanted to do something a little different. Today I’ll be talking about one of my favorite non-famous books which, as you might’ve guessed by the title of this post, is realistic fiction.

My middle school favorite book is called Counting by 7s Holly Goldberg Sloan. You might’ve heard of it before, but you probably haven’t if you’re not in a specific age range. The protagonist is a middle school age black girl, which is what I was when I was in middle school. She is adopted to two white parents, who tragically die at the beginning of the story. She then goes on a journey of finding who she is while making friends along the way. The character is a little eccentric as well, she’s a genius, which means she’s socially awkward. The title of the book comes from her, Willow Chance’s, habit of counting by sevens when she’s feeling stressed. As a quick side note, I would like to mention that Willow Chance knew many digits of pi, which is something I also related to as a middle schooler. While my retention of the digits of pi is dwindling, I learned 800 digits when I was eleven years old. It deeply annoyed my advisory when I displayed my knowledge once a week, but I was stopped from sharing at around 400 digits. A quote from the book that I remember to this day, and which meant a lot to me in middle school was, “It’s possible all labels are curses, unless they’re on cleaning products.” I don’t know why that quote meant so much to me, but perhaps it made me feel like I wasn’t what people thought of me. Willow Chance wasn’t an awkward loser genius, but when she held onto others’ belief that she was, she could never truly be herself. The reason I liked this book so much was because it made me feel seen. There’s a common trope of the misfit middle schooler/ high schooler, but not so much a common trope of a smart black girl misfit middle schooler who finds solace in being herself. Usually the misfit is white, average, and eventually ends up popular. I found a little solace in that trope, but I was thankful to have Counting by 7s to make me feel like I wasn’t alone.

I’m going to digress a little bit here, but bear with me. I wanted to talk about the Rosie Project series by Graeme Simsion. It’s about a genealogist with mild autism, and I can’t relate to it at all. However, I really like this series. It’s a love story, which usually isn’t my forte, but this is something I can get behind. The warmth of this book is apparent in every page.

The world needs realistic fiction, and especially the type of realistic fiction that tells new stories.