CBR18 Bingo: Summer – The book is set in the heat of Jamaica and the Caribbean Sea, where there is an endless summer.
After a hurricane wrecks their home, the Bas-Thornton children and their neighbors, the Fernandez children, are sent off on a ship to England. When they are intercepted by pirates, their lives take an abrupt turn – but whether it is the children or the pirates who will cause the most harm remains to be seen.
The cover image for the edition of A High Wind in Jamaica which I read is taken from artwork created by the outsider artist Henry Darger, who somewhat compulsively wrote about and painted innocent children in great, horrific, and rather bizarre peril, which seems pretty spot on for this book. It’s sort of Peter Pan meets The Lord of the Flies, but specifically if you consider Peter Pan more of the horror story out of the two.
The tone of the narrative is quite innocent and gay and heartless, detached in the way which lets you just sit back and observe what is going on. There’s a general undercurrent of peril, and the fact that reader is well aware of it while it goes right over the heads of the narrating children adds horribly to the tension you feel. At the same time, though, there’s danger brewing in the minds of those children which the pirates are quite unaware of too, so that tenson goes both ways. The
I did wonder if the detachment does obscure some otherwise interesting perspectives. I would have certainly liked to know more about what was going on in poor Margaret’s head, as well as other members of the crew. While the narrative focuses mostly closely on Emily, the second born of the Bas-Thornton children, I wanted to see what was going on with the others more. But maybe that is because she alarmed me, so being in her head was stressful. The ending is a bit abrupt, but I suppose I’m not sure where it could have gone next.
Warning that there’s a crazy amount of animal cruelty, which is extremely matter-of-fact in the way a kid who likes burning ants with a magnifying glass is.
