Book Descriptions
for The Happiness of Kati by Jane Vejjajiva
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
Nine-year-old Kati lives with her grandparents in a small Thai village where the rhythms of life are marked by the daily offerings to the monks before breakfast and school, and slow journeys in a paddleboat through the flooded rice fields. Then there is a phone call, and a trip by car to a beach house far away—the house where Kati’s mother is dying. Although Kati can hardly remember her mother she has always held her in her heart. Now, in their final days together, Kati’s mother tells stories that give Kati back bits of the past. Following her mother’s death, Kati is taken to the apartment in Bangkok where her mother had been living and working as an international attorney before falling ill with ALS. There, loving family and friends carry out the final, carefully laid plans that Kati’s mother had made, turning over boxes and boxes of memories to Kati. One of them holds the answer to the question Kati has never brought herself to ask: who is my father? Kati is an acute observer of all that goes on around her in Jane Vejjajiva’s spare, tender, dreamlike novel. And despite her loss, she is a child grounded in the certainty of love. (Ages 9–13)
CCBC Choices 2007 . © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2007. Used with permission.
From The United States Board on Books for Young People (USBBY)
The Thai section of IBBY was first founded in 1979 then reestablished in 2001 under the name of Books for Children Foundation (ThaiBBY), with the support of the Publishers and Booksellers Association of Thailand (PUBAT). ThaiBBY is very active in supporting libraries for street children, for children in custody, for children in the rural areas, and for children with disabilities. It also organizes the children’s book fair Book Festival for Young People every July.
Originally pub lished in Thai by Preaw Juvenile Books, in 2003. Translated by Prudence Borthwick.
Bridges to Understanding: Envisioning the World through Children's Books. © USBBY, 2011. Used with permission.