To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee and Richard Hughes's A High Wind to Jamaica

Richard Hughes's A High Wind to Jamaica is about The Bas-Thorntons are Brits who live in Jamaica.  After a hurricane destroys their house, they decide to go back to England. (Richard Hughes Pp. 12-17.)

The parents cram the children off on a ship and plan to follow later.  Along arrive some pirates who board the boat, take the young kids on board their schooner as hostages, and intimidate to murder them if the head person does not disclose where the money is.  The head person "bravely" refuses to notify, until the pirates intimidate to go under the ship. (Kevin Joseph Pp. 16)

The pirates are really just after cash, and have no intention of murdering anyone, as a murdering would change their penalty if caught into a capital offense.  So, they destroy a assortment of stuff and hurl the children's luggage overboard.  But the captain is mistakenly assured that the young kids have been slain and it was their bodies that were deep-sixed so he takes off without them. So, now these pirates have a assortment of ruined British young kids on their hands.  What pursues is hard to describe.

It's hard, mostly, for me to interpret.  On the one hand, there are abounding of occurrences that hit me on first reading as quite comical, but which became more than a little distracting on the second pass.  The young kids act pretty much like young kids everywhere--self-absorbed, unobservant, and dwelling in a fantasy world.  The narrator converses like a curmudgeon who really doesn't like children.  So the storytelling was comical in a grumpy sort of way.  Hughes did a large job of apprehending the non sequiturs that so often punctuate the child's edge of a conversation with an adult.  But, what seemed charming at first appears more sinister upon recognising that these young kids have wholeheartedly no anxiety about any thing that adults recognize as significant: like the pain, suffering, or death of other humans.  The eldest brother, trying to better glimpse a commotion on deck, leans too far and falls to his death.  The other children are off in some fantasy world and proceed as though nothing had occurred, going about their play as though he not ever existed.  Later, one of the girls, while up in the rigging, lets slip a device which strikes and gravely wounds her sister. 

When the tool falls, she shouts in repugnance, but only because what she sees is not a dangerous tool hurtling in the direction of her beloved sister, but her "baby" falling from her grab. To murder A Mocking Bird is about prejudice, contaminating of children's innocence and conscience. These three topics are continuously recurring in the innovative, and they furthermore relentlessly emerge in our everyday life. To endure in this humanity, we wear masks to protect our feelings. But with masks on our faces, we cannot glimpse these three things with fairness and the reality in front of ...