3 ideas
Nine-year-old Kati lives with her grandparents in a riverside house in rural Thailand and has been told little about her absent mother. She learns her mother has ALS and has been living apart, partly so Kati would not watch her body fail. Kati is brought to spend her mother's last weeks with her, and after the death she inherits both the grief and her mother's unanswered secrets, including the question of who her father is.
The book treats happiness as something built from what remains, such as daily routines, the river, and grandparents' steady care, rather than something ruined by what is missing. On this view contentment comes from being able to hold a loss and still value the present, not from having no losses.
Instead of deciding for her daughter, the dying mother leaves Kati the means to pursue what was hidden, such as contacting her unknown father, and lets her decide whether to use it. This shifts the parent's role from managing the child's knowledge to trusting the child to set her own pace with painful truths.