After playing an orphaned Louisiana girl in Beasts of the Southern Wild* and an orphaned New Yorker in the upcoming Annie remake, Quevenzhane Wallis will continue her strange streak of parentless roles by playing an orphaned California kid in the adaptation of the highly acclaimed children’s book Counting by 7s.

Written by Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s has its young protagonist, Willow Chance, lose her parents twice over: first her biological mother and father, then her adoptive ones. The book description is as follows:

“Willow Chance is a twelve-year-old genius, obsessed with nature and diagnosing medical conditions, who finds it comforting to count by 7s. It has never been easy for her to connect with anyone other than her adoptive parents, but that hasn’t kept her from leading a quietly happy life… until now. Suddenly Willow’s world is tragically changed when her parents both die in a car crash, leaving her alone in a baffling world. The triumph of this book is that it is not a tragedy. This extraordinarily odd, but extraordinarily endearing, girl manages to push through her grief. Her journey to find a fascinatingly diverse and fully believable surrogate family is a joy and a revelation to read.”

Counting by 7s will mark Wallis’ third starring role since her breakout performance in 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, for which she became the youngest actress ever to receive an Oscar nod.

After Annie, Wallis will next be seen — hopefully with a parent — in the mental-breakdown drama Fathers and Daughters, and voice a character in Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet.

(*Spoiler alert about Beasts: Wallis’ character loses her father midway through the movie.)

[h/t Shadow and Act]