I know I’ve told the memory differently over the years, adding in details about toys or sounds or maybe a smell wafting in, but the truth is that I just have this one scant moving image.

I don’t know where I was or what I was doing, but I remember looking at a pattern in the wood and then turning toward a doorway. The earliest memory I have is of staring up at the bottom of a kitchen table. And, of course, awful things do happen-often and with startling frankness-but they are always quickly buried under the book’s relentless trend towards lightness.Ĥ. You get the feeling after a while that Hughes is totally aware that you’re aware of the divide between high adventure and childhood trauma, and so he starts to fuck with your sense that awful things need to happen.ģ. In the spirit of Calvino’s later lecture on lightness versus weight, the narrative manages to float just above the threat of violence. Of course, that last part seems a little extreme and out of place, and that’s really the book’s program, because simmering just below this surface is the constant threat of rape and murder.Ģ. They are eventually returned home, and the pirates’ subsequent arrest, trial, and execution rounds out the proceedings. Early on in the voyage the children are taken aboard a pirate ship whereupon they visit exotic ports and busy themselves with imaginary games. After a hurricane hits an English settlement in Jamaica, two families decide to send their children back to England. On the surface, Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica is a dot-to-dot adventure tale. 279 pages / $14.00 buy from NYRB or Amazonġ.

A high wind in jamaica review