The Ice Chips and the Haunted Hurricane

Roy MacGregor's The Ice Chips and the Haunted Hurricane is a time-slip hockey adventure for 8 year olds that opens in total darkness, on a boat, in a storm.

What happens

Lucas, Edge and Swift skate hard at their own rink, cross the centre line, and land somewhere else entirely. It's their second time through, so this time they packed boots and backpacks.

What they didn't pack for was a hurricane.

They're in the hold of a fishing trawler heading for Halifax Harbour. Life jackets and fishing nets are raining on their heads. Nobody back home can hear them, because their team-mate with the tablet is a very long way away.

Then a voice comes through on the walkie-talkie. A boy. He can hear them, and he has no idea who they are.

Meanwhile two other Ice Chips have landed in that same boy's basement, hiding behind a hockey net while he takes practice shots at it.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The boat is thrown sideways, a heavy toolbox skids past Swift's prosthetic leg, and Lucas goes over the side into the waves with a girl screaming his name from the bow. Exciting rather than gruesome, but it isn't gentle and there's a fair bit of it.

There is a lot to hold, mind. Long sentences, a big cast, and hockey vocabulary coming thick and fast. A hockey-mad reader will fly through it, and one who isn't may want it read aloud.

The quieter half is the better half, honestly. Back in Riverton the Chips are terrible. They lose an exhibition game eight to one. Lucas steps onto the ice, falls flat on his backside, and finds that somebody has filed the edges clean off his skates (he has a fair idea who).

Then his coach quietly gives his place on the line to the boy he suspects.

If your reader has ever been dropped from a team, or watched a friend picked ahead of them, that sting is done properly here.

What to read next

For another pair of children carried off somewhere they never asked to go, the library has Summer of the Sea Serpent. Jack and Annie get a message, wish themselves into a much older world, and have until nightfall to finish what they were sent for.