A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
Published 1929 · 284 pages · 70,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is A High Wind in Jamaica to read?
A High Wind in Jamaica scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 45 out of 100
- Hughes writes clear English appropriate for a story involving children. No obscure vocabulary. The prose is precise but accessible.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Clean, well-constructed sentences. Hughes maintains control without calling attention to technique. The style serves the story's unsettling content.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- The novel works through implication rather than statement. Questions about childhood, innocence, and violence arise from specific events. Hughes doesn't philosophize directly.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- A short novel with simple plot. Hughes takes time with scenes, building unease through observation. Not dense with event or information.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Hughes shows the children's behavior without psychological explanation. Emily's violence, her forgetting, her moral blankness—all rendered without editorial comment. Readers must interpret.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The hurricane, the pirate ship, the Captain's attraction to Emily—images carry thematic weight. But Hughes works primarily through realism, not symbol.
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- The gap between what children feel and what adults assume they feel generates the novel's disturbing irony. Innocence proves a category error.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- Plot events resolve—trial, conviction—but what the children's experience means, who is truly guilty, what Emily has become, stays open.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Linear narrative following the children from Jamaica to England via the pirate ship. Simple structure containing complex psychology.
How A High Wind in Jamaica is regarded
A High Wind in Jamaica holds a literary regard score of 55 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.