Vocabulary from " The Round House" (excerpt) by Louise Erdrich

Winner of this year's American Book Award, "The Round House" is a tale of recovery and revenge, an examination of how trauma affects an entire family. In this excerpt we get to know our 13-year old narrator and his father. Excerpt available here
14 words 47 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. rigid
    incapable of or resistant to bending
    They were just seedlings with one or two rigid, healthy leaves.
  2. shingle
    building material used as siding or roofing
    Nevertheless, the stalky shoots had managed to squeeze through knife cracks in the decorative brown shingles covering the cement blocks.
  3. pry
    move or force in an effort to get something open
    They had grown into the unseen wall and it was difficult to pry them loose.
  4. wield
    have and exercise
    I was using a rusted old dandelion fork with a splintered handle; he wielded a long, slim iron fireplace poker that was probably doing more harm than good.
  5. prod
    poke or thrust abruptly
    As my father prodded away blindly at the places where he sensed roots might have penetrated, he was surely making convenient holes in the mortar for next year's seedlings.
  6. persist
    refuse to stop
    I thought it was a wonder the treelets had persisted through a North Dakota winter.
  7. feeble
    pathetically lacking in force or effectiveness
    They'd had water perhaps, but only feeble light and a few crumbs of earth.
  8. tendril
    slender structure by which some plants attach to an object
    Yet each seed had managed to sink the hasp of a root deep and a probing tendril outward.
  9. contrary
    exact opposition
    You would think then that I would have stopped, a thirteen-year-old boy with better things to do, but on the contrary.
  10. meticulous
    marked by precise accordance with details
    And it seemed important as well that I do a meticulous job, as opposed to so many of my shoddily completed chores.
  11. parse
    analyze the sentence structure of
    Nevertheless, I was parsing out the idea, established in other cases and reinforced in this one, that our treaties with the government were like treaties with foreign nations.
  12. grandeur
    the quality of being magnificent or splendid
    That the grandeur and power my Mooshum talked about wasn't entirely lost, as it was, at least to some degree I meant to know, still protected by the law.
  13. mull
    reflect deeply on a subject
    A tribal enrollment specialist, she was probably mulling over some petition she'd been handed.
  14. stride
    walk with long steps
    I strode along beside him.
Created on Sun Nov 24 19:36:57 EST 2013 (updated Sun Nov 24 19:54:19 EST 2013)

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