Jasmine Warga's new book A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall features Rami, a boy who accompanies his mother, who is a cleaner at a museum, to work. He often sits in the galleries and ponders the art while his mother is working. While he is welcomed by the museum director, other staff, in particular a security guard, are not happy he is there. An important painting goes missing and Rami meets a familiar looking ghost.
Here’s our new What We’re Reading feature: a mini-book club conversation between Grand Rapids Area Library children’s librarian Tracy Kampa and What We’re Reading producer Tammy Bobrowsky.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
Tammy: This is such a fun story. It's a mystery, and there's so many great mystery elements in it. But it's also got some mystical aspects to the story, too, which I found really intriguing. And that's kind of fun when you have something that's not really a full-blown fantasy, paranormal or magic story, but when you just have like a touch of it--I thought that worked really nicely.
Tracy: I thought it did, too. And in this instance, other than the potential ghost. We also have a turtle named Agatha. What did you enjoy about Agatha?
Tammy: That's a great name for a turtle, right? She sees and she knows what’s going on, but how does a turtle communicate that? She's a big part of the story even though she's just a little turtle.
Tracy: And she's a little turtle who lives in the garden. She never leaves her garden, but she is the one who drives the plot to where it needs to go, which I find fascinating. The other thing I thought was really intriguing about the characters in the story is that the author chose to take Rami, the young main character, and essentially strip everybody away from him. His father had abandoned him. We find out that his best friends have now rejected him, and he’s kind of just alone with his mother. I think that that works very well to make Rami so alone that he is open to a friendship with Veda, another classmate that he normally wouldn't be open to. I think that was a great platform to launch the two of them off on their adventures.
Tammy: Yeah, it's also a big motivator. Rami decides that he needs to solve this mystery of who took the painting, and I feel like all of those elements motivated him to get to the bottom of what happened.
Tracy: Absolutely. And interestingly enough, Veda already wanted to get to the bottom of it. She first thought that it must have been stolen by a rich man, because that's what rich men do--they go and steal paintings from museums. Turns out she was wrong. Turns out, Agatha the turtle knew who did it. But we don't find that out until the very end.
So did the connection between H.F. Bottomtow (who was the artist of the painting) and the ghost girl ring true for you? Did you think that that was a true connection?
Tammy: I have to give some props to Jasmine Warga because there were times when I was like, ‘OK, there's got to be a connection between this person and this person and this person,’ and then a couple chapters later, I'd be ‘OK. There's not a connection, but maybe there's a connection with these other people.’ So I think she really knows her mystery writing in that she kept me guessing a lot. Obviously, we don't want to give away too much, but the connections made sense at the end when they revealed themselves to us and they were a great way to wrap the story up together with. So I was happy with how it turned out. She did a really good job getting us to keep turning that page and trying to figure out ‘who dun it.’ How about you?
"Art, she understood, was a wish that you made with your hands."in Jasmine Warga's "A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall."
Tracy: Yeah, very much so. I thought that element of the story for a while is what kept me turning the pages wondering, ‘Could they be connected and how are they connected?’ And we're not giving anything away by telling you that H.F. Bottomtow, the artist of the painting, spends much of this story in a coma, and that's an important element to this story.
I also like to take note of really great thoughts anytime I read a book and I just loved this quote that Hannah the artist said as a girl: “Art was a wish you made with your hands.”
Tammy: I'm so glad you said that because I wrote that down too!
Tracy: I just think it's beautiful and I think it applies to all sorts of art. And it applies to what we as humans strive to do.
Tammy: I did a little background searching into Jasmine Warga and she got an art history degree in college and this story is set in an art museum. So, I'm wondering if she kind used some of that knowledge that she gained in college to write this story. I thought that was an interesting tie-in.
Tracy: That was awesome. I also really love how self-aware this book is and I love when sometimes a book will take it upon themselves to break the 4th wall and talk to the reader personally. When they were talking about Agatha the turtle, Jasmine Warger writes, “The turtle, of course did not answer. This is a story with lots of mysterious and strange things, but it is not a story that features a turtle who can speak with humans.”
Tammy: She's keeping it real!
Tracy: And that's an important element of the story--why not just put it out there? If you need to figure out what the turtle is doing, you're going to have to use your brain because the turtle is not going to tell you!
Tammy: So Tracy, would you recommend this book and why?
Tracy: I would recommend this book because I think it is a really well-developed middle grade mystery. There's a few times in this book when you and I said, ‘Ohh, I wasn't expecting that.’
I love how you can take a young boy who was all alone and a girl who is known as being too talkative, too powerful, and too much (which is actually somebody that I can relate to very, very well) and put them together and make them equal partners in solving this. And all along we're watching Rami develop as a young man-- how in the end he is able to talk to his mother about things that he needs to talk to her about, where at the beginning of the story he just could not. I love seeing that character development. What about you?
Tammy: Oh yes, absolutely. This is a big recommendation and for all the reasons you talked about. But also--I didn’t get the sense that the author was talking down to children. Just straightforward treating these characters as if they were real people and I appreciated that.
Learn more about Jasmine Warga’s A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall.
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