WORD LISTS

"Ice Magic" by Matt Christopher, Chapters 1–3

Mon May 08 10:57:06 EDT 2023
By Vocabulary.com (NY)Visual Thesaurus Moderator
When middle schooler Pie Pennelli is told by the Byrd twins that his recent hockey game had exactly the same moves and score as the one they'd played on a toy the night before, he is unsure what to think about this possible magic.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Chapters 1–3, Chapters 4–8, Chapters 9–13
vibrant
As if thinking about it was a signal, there came a sudden knocking on his door and his mother's vibrant voice. “Pie! Get up!”
gorge
He walked up Oak Street, crossed Madison, and turned left, soon reaching the high wire fence that separated the street from the gorge that gave the village of Deep Gorge its name.
chasm
A squirrel chattered as it clung, head down, onto the side of a tree that hung over the breathless chasm, and Pie smiled.
exasperated
“What do you do Friday nights? Watch the late-late show?”
“And the late-late-late show, too,” Pie replied, exasperated. He hadn’t sat down yet to put on his skates and Terry was already picking on him.
crusty
He didn’t know why Terry was so crusty toward him.
capacity
Only a handful of fans sat in the stands that seated a capacity crowd of three thousand.
designate
Up on the electric scoreboard the time clock read 12:00. The first of the four large glass buttons beneath the hour lights was lit. Each button designated a period.
belligerent
Terry and Ed Kadola, the Bears’ belligerent center, slapped at it, and it skewed across the ice to Bud.
chafe
And Pie heard Terry yell, “You slowpoke! We could’ve scored!”
Almost on the heels of Terry’s chafing remark came a yell from the stands.
wrest
Across the red center line the Penguins’ two defensemen were struggling to wrest the puck away from the Bears’ forwards.
groggy
The Bears rolled off him, and he climbed slowly to his feet, groggy and tired.
jubilant
The rink resounded with a roar as jubilant Penguins drummed their sticks against the boards.
futile
Up shot the goalie in a futile effort to catch it with his gloved hand.
plague
Pie skated off the ice, plagued by his oversize skates more than he was by Terry’s cutting sarcasm.
bewildered
“What is?” he asked bewilderedly.
clout
Bang! Chuck clouted the puck toward the Bears’ net.
evade
They passed it back and forth among them, evading Bud, Terry, Chuck, and Frog with quick, accurate passes.
dejected
Ed Courtney picked the puck up dejectedly and tossed it to the ref, while the huge room thundered with the resounding noise of hockey sticks drumming against the boards.
resounding
Ed Courtney picked the puck up dejectedly and tossed it to the ref, while the huge room thundered with the resounding noise of hockey sticks drumming against the boards.
momentum
The combination of oversize skates and momentum made it impossible for Pie to turn in time, and he went crashing into the goalie.
disgruntled
Disgruntled, he disentangled himself from the goalie and crawled out of the crease.
determination
Pie came back on the ice filled with the determination to get that score back, and he managed to drive a shot that missed the net by inches.
blunt
While the second line was on the ice, Terry said to Pie, “We’re going on the ice one more time. Hope you don’t do anything to get yourself in the sin bin.”
“You think I want to get in there?” Pie snorted.
“Well—you play as if you do,” Terry answered, bluntly.
curt
Pie remembered Terry’s curt warning and tried his best not to commit a foul.
sullen
Ignoring him, Pie skated to his position, sullen and dead tired.
dismally
Man, I just can't do a thing right, he thought dismally.
frigid
The frigid air nipped at his cheeks like sharp teeth.
emphatically
“Of course, we’re sure,” Jody replied emphatically.
junction
They reached the junction opposite the gorge and turned right on Oak, none of them saying a word during the last one hundred feet.
immerse
They were immersed in the toy hockey game, which seemed to be controlled by some kind of magical power.
grueling
“What’ve you got to eat?”
Those were the first words he always greeted her with when he returned from a grueling hockey game.
maneuver
On it stood four-inch-high plywood figures that were maneuvered by rods protruding from the narrow ends.
crude
“It looks handmade,” he observed.
“It is,” Jody replied. “There’s a name carved on the side of it. Look.”
He lifted the game and saw a crudely carved name: SKXROT.
incredulously
“Really? Was hockey played that many years ago?” Joliette asked, incredulously.
protruding
Pie took hold of the knobs of each rod protruding from the ends of the game and began pushing them back and forth, thereby manipulating the players in the slots on the rink.
endowed
This hockey game is endowed with magical powers.
dissipate
However,
Beware what happens on a real rink first
Repeats here not, for fate
Promises that, as true as bubbles burst,
The magic will dissipate.
manipulate
Pie had difficulty manipulating his men as rapidly as Jody did, and after ten minutes of play Jody won, 5 to 1.
genuine
During all that time Pie looked for something strange about the toy hockey game, something that would prove to him that it definitely had magical powers. But he saw nothing, and in spite of the message that the twins had found with the game, he began to doubt its genuineness.
avid
“Maybe it won’t work if you play it,” Joliette said, her blue eyes looking at him avidly.

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