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gglazer's review against another edition
4.0
One of the descriptions below says it all: "a crew of well-meaning pirates fall into the clutches of half a dozen children." I read this book after hearing a reviewer rave about it on NPR, and I'm very glad I did... it's disquieting and strange, written in this detached and disjointed way, with an oddly visible narrator that jumps in once every 50 pages or so. The author's casual racism is also disquieting, but somehow it heightens the sense of place and time as well.
I also keep going back to something the NPR reviewer said about the cruelty of Emily, the main child character -- and it's funny, I'm not sure I agree at all with his assessment. Maybe this book's morals, as well as the plot of the ending, are very much open to interpretation.
I also keep going back to something the NPR reviewer said about the cruelty of Emily, the main child character -- and it's funny, I'm not sure I agree at all with his assessment. Maybe this book's morals, as well as the plot of the ending, are very much open to interpretation.
neven's review against another edition
5.0
A strange mix of children’s adventure tale and almost existentialist fiction, swaying from jolly Victorian hijinks to disturbing gothic horror. Wonderfully unpredictable, and often more sincere and truthful of children’s experiences than a more straightforward novel would’ve been.
catebutler's review against another edition
Real Readers Book Club (Liz) - August 2019
cathy_messier's review against another edition
4.0
I have never read a book where childhood was portrayed this way. Absolutely worth reading.
gastronauta's review against another edition
4.0
Slumming! Pirates!! Creepy children!!
This book has it all.
This book has it all.
oldpondnewfrog's review against another edition
4.0
Such great wild-child childhood at the beginning—the children just roam free on their island, exploring and enjoying. The beginning is really five-star stuff.
"The stream which fed the bathing-hole ran into it down a gully through the bush which offered an enticing vista for exploring: but somehow the children did not often go up it very far. Every stone had to be turned over in the hope of finding crayfish: or if not, John had to take a sporting gun, which he bulleted with spoonfuls of water to shoot humming-birds on the wing, too tiny frail quarry for any soldier projectile."
The style overall is quite old-fashioned, I suppose this was written in 1927—but it seems to be of an older generation than Hemingway.
Good, strange story.
"The stream which fed the bathing-hole ran into it down a gully through the bush which offered an enticing vista for exploring: but somehow the children did not often go up it very far. Every stone had to be turned over in the hope of finding crayfish: or if not, John had to take a sporting gun, which he bulleted with spoonfuls of water to shoot humming-birds on the wing, too tiny frail quarry for any soldier projectile."
The style overall is quite old-fashioned, I suppose this was written in 1927—but it seems to be of an older generation than Hemingway.
Good, strange story.
smcleish's review against another edition
3.0
Originally published on my blog here in January 2001.
Following a fairly idyllic childhood in 1860s Jamaica, a group of children are sent to England to go to school. Their ship is waylaid by pirates, and they are captured. They spend some months on the ship - their parents having been told that the pirates have killed them - before their captors, unable to think what to do with them, put them aboard a legitimate passenger ship.
The plot of A High Wind in Jamaica is not particularly important. It is a novel about what it is like to be a child, and it is perhaps the best evocation of that world that has ever been written. It is a world with dark corners; the oldest of the children, a teenage girl, is molested by one of the pirates, another girl kills a man, and one of the boys is accidentally killed. However, most of the life of the children is taken up with enjoying new experiences and inventing all kinds of games and stories - the boys imagining themselves as pirates, for example. The resilience of childhood is one of the novel's most important themes.
From a literary point of view, the significance of A High Wind in Jamaica is that it is one of the earliest novels to treat of children in a naturalistic way. Children in earlier novels tend to be saints or little adults, or to have unlikely idyllic childhoods. [a:Mark Twain|1244|Mark Twain|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1322103868p2/1244.jpg] is of course an important precursor, but Tom Sawyer is a bit older and his child characters are more mischievous than rounded; it is more to writers like [a:Frances Hodgson Burnett|2041|Frances Hodgson Burnett|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1197934848p2/2041.jpg] that Hughes should be compared for contrast. [b:Lord of the Flies|7624|Lord of the Flies|William Golding|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327869409s/7624.jpg|2766512] is the novel which comes to mind most readily when reading A High Wind in Jamaica; Golding's children are more savage, which is partly because they are again older and partly because they are more completely outside the adult world.
Following a fairly idyllic childhood in 1860s Jamaica, a group of children are sent to England to go to school. Their ship is waylaid by pirates, and they are captured. They spend some months on the ship - their parents having been told that the pirates have killed them - before their captors, unable to think what to do with them, put them aboard a legitimate passenger ship.
The plot of A High Wind in Jamaica is not particularly important. It is a novel about what it is like to be a child, and it is perhaps the best evocation of that world that has ever been written. It is a world with dark corners; the oldest of the children, a teenage girl, is molested by one of the pirates, another girl kills a man, and one of the boys is accidentally killed. However, most of the life of the children is taken up with enjoying new experiences and inventing all kinds of games and stories - the boys imagining themselves as pirates, for example. The resilience of childhood is one of the novel's most important themes.
From a literary point of view, the significance of A High Wind in Jamaica is that it is one of the earliest novels to treat of children in a naturalistic way. Children in earlier novels tend to be saints or little adults, or to have unlikely idyllic childhoods. [a:Mark Twain|1244|Mark Twain|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1322103868p2/1244.jpg] is of course an important precursor, but Tom Sawyer is a bit older and his child characters are more mischievous than rounded; it is more to writers like [a:Frances Hodgson Burnett|2041|Frances Hodgson Burnett|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1197934848p2/2041.jpg] that Hughes should be compared for contrast. [b:Lord of the Flies|7624|Lord of the Flies|William Golding|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327869409s/7624.jpg|2766512] is the novel which comes to mind most readily when reading A High Wind in Jamaica; Golding's children are more savage, which is partly because they are again older and partly because they are more completely outside the adult world.
lachesisreads's review against another edition
5.0
On the surface, this is the story of the Bas-Thornton children, who live with their British family on a plantation on Jamaica and are sent home by ship to grow up in civilisation. The ship is captured by pirates, and they have many adventures on the pirate ship before finally getting to England and being reunited with their parents. However, it's so much more than that.
This book is, bewilderingly, classed as a children's book - and a child could probably read it and enjoy it very much, and it would tell you it's about pirates.
But it is not. Reading this as an adult, the unease quickly starts growing, and after the introductory chapters that set up the story, it quickly becomes very wild and very weird. The story is about growing up, about the unbridgeable gap between children and adults, about sexual awakening, about what civilisation means, about moral ambiguity.
It's difficult to talk about this book without giving the plot away, and you really ought to read it knowing as little about it beforehand as you can. It's a wild ride and certainly not a book I'll easily forget.
I read this book for the challenge "20th century classic" in the Back to the Classics Challenge on Books and Chocolate's blog.
This book is, bewilderingly, classed as a children's book - and a child could probably read it and enjoy it very much, and it would tell you it's about pirates.
But it is not. Reading this as an adult, the unease quickly starts growing, and after the introductory chapters that set up the story, it quickly becomes very wild and very weird. The story is about growing up, about the unbridgeable gap between children and adults, about sexual awakening, about what civilisation means, about moral ambiguity.
It's difficult to talk about this book without giving the plot away, and you really ought to read it knowing as little about it beforehand as you can. It's a wild ride and certainly not a book I'll easily forget.
I read this book for the challenge "20th century classic" in the Back to the Classics Challenge on Books and Chocolate's blog.
anniekcdc44's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
funny
tense
fast-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
darwin8u's review against another edition
5.0
"After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances."
A shortcut I use when thinking about a novel, and it IS a shortcut, is to imagine fitting the book I've just read within a series of other books, or as a color made from mixing several books together. It is childish, rough, and only gets me part of the way there, but it is a start (even if it is an adolescent start). I also, with a book I am unfamiliar with, try to avoid poisoning the well by reading reviews or opinions about it. I want to come to it clean, fresh, to see it for a moment with my own eyes.
So? What books did I mix for this one? For me it was a combination of Peter Pan, Heart of Darkness, and Lord of the Flies. Yeah. Wrap your head around that. It was, however, more poetic than any of these. The prose was like a fever dream. Some of the scenes in Jamaica were lush and magical. It was told with colors seen from a child's eyes, events were described through the experience of a child. It wasn't just a trick. Hughes mastered this. He didn't condescend to children. He didn't put them on some victorian pedestal. He measured them by age, by experience, and oriented his story accordingly.
The story really is about the loss of innocence (oh, and an earthquake), but as much it is a story about how resilient children are to that loss of innocence (oh, and an alligator). How much children live in the now and wrap that now in myths. Hughes gave the children in this novel the right to be human, to deal with complexity in their own way. I'm still buzzing a bit from how much I really dug this novel. I'm glad I read it and am still surprised I was never exposed to it before.
A shortcut I use when thinking about a novel, and it IS a shortcut, is to imagine fitting the book I've just read within a series of other books, or as a color made from mixing several books together. It is childish, rough, and only gets me part of the way there, but it is a start (even if it is an adolescent start). I also, with a book I am unfamiliar with, try to avoid poisoning the well by reading reviews or opinions about it. I want to come to it clean, fresh, to see it for a moment with my own eyes.
So? What books did I mix for this one? For me it was a combination of Peter Pan, Heart of Darkness, and Lord of the Flies. Yeah. Wrap your head around that. It was, however, more poetic than any of these. The prose was like a fever dream. Some of the scenes in Jamaica were lush and magical. It was told with colors seen from a child's eyes, events were described through the experience of a child. It wasn't just a trick. Hughes mastered this. He didn't condescend to children. He didn't put them on some victorian pedestal. He measured them by age, by experience, and oriented his story accordingly.
The story really is about the loss of innocence (oh, and an earthquake), but as much it is a story about how resilient children are to that loss of innocence (oh, and an alligator). How much children live in the now and wrap that now in myths. Hughes gave the children in this novel the right to be human, to deal with complexity in their own way. I'm still buzzing a bit from how much I really dug this novel. I'm glad I read it and am still surprised I was never exposed to it before.