“They are like two chocolates in a box. But on the inside, they have different centers.”
Karina and Chris are neighbors, but they aren’t friends. Karina is a 7th grader who dreads the school bus where kids like Chris tease her for having hair on her arms. Chris struggles with math but unexpectedly discovers that Karina’s grandfather, Mr. Chopra, is a great math tutor. When Karina and Chris see each other in a new light, it open their worlds to each other and they become proper friends.
Then, out of the blue, when Karina, Chris, and Mr. Chopra are simply walking down the street, Mr. Chopra is accosted by a stranger, verbally abused, and physically attacked. This shocking scene sets the story of Count Me In in motion.
“It’s cool to think about stuff bigger than ourselves.”
Mr. Chopra has a fractured femur and will slowly recover, but Karina still wants to understand why a stranger who knows nothing about her grandfather or her family could do something so awful. Where does the hatred and fear come from? As an amateur photographer, she begins to post pictures documenting and exploring the attack on social media. The galvanic response encourages Karina to do more
“Social media – that’s our drum.”
Karina embarks on an expansive social media project to share the many varied faces of American people, discovering and sharing a multicultural stew that reflects the long history of assimilating people from varied lands. Karina’s curiosity yields a continuing stream of people sharing their own photographs. She ends up using the hashtag #CountMeIn for the project, and even aspires to enter a display in a local photography gallery explaining to the gallery owner: “This is all of us.”
The blooming friendship between Karina and Chris provides Count Me In’s middle-school heart, but it is the larger project, Karina’s exploration into the questions about people from different cultures in our midst, and the use of social media to open eyes and change hearts that turned Count Me In into a Global Read Aloud selection.
Karina becomes more confident and self-assertive as the story progresses, thanks to the support of Chris and a growing number of her classmates. While her project is largely independent, Karina receives a piece of quiet, inspiring advice from her teacher, Mrs. Trotter. The quote Mrs. Trotter shares, from G.K. Chesterton, becomes the message of the book: “We are all in the same boat upon a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.”
