Rubber Houses

Module 9, SLIS 5420

Summary

Kit remembers her 9-year-old brother, who dies of cancer. She relives their shared love of baseball and math, but mostly baseball. The novel is told in free verse, and the individual poems tell of her progression through the steps of remembrance and grief. Her daily life, as she works through her grief in interacting with family and friends is very moving. Kit's reactions are filtered through a full year, given in terms of a baseball season/off-season, in telling the story.

Bibliographic Information

Yeomans, Ellen. Rubber Houses. Hachette Book Group USA, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-316-10647-4

My Thoughts

This is a very moving book. The short poems that make up the text allow the author to pack a great deal of emotion and imagery into the passages in snippets. The narrator's feelings about the loss of her brother and the changes in her relationsionships with her family and friends come accross very effectively in this medium. The imagery that Kit projects through words describing family as team and baseball diamond as home is touching given her shared love of the game with her dead brother, Buddy.

Reviews

When Kit is a junior, her little brother, Buddy, who loves baseball and math, is stricken with cancer. Her fun-loving high school world and reasonably happy family life are turned on end. As Buddy's illness intensifies, so does the turmoil and tension that the family experiences, and when he dies the summer before her senior year, everything falls apart for Kit. She and her parents have a terrible time coping with their loss, until they can find a way through their grief. For Kit, a teen bereavement group, a new job at a hardware store, and a reconnection with her best friend help her begin to bring her life back together. This realistic, sad, sparingly written yet powerful verse novel brings into focus a terrible ordeal that can sideswipe a family. Kit is a well-drawn character, a loving sister who cannot fathom the loss of her beloved sibling but who must. She must also learn to cope if she is to survive, and when she begins to regain her life the reader will want to cheer. Those drawn to Sonya Sones's Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy (HarperCollins, 1999) and Jordan Sonnenblick's Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie (Scholastic, 2005/VOYA December 2004), will find similar intensity and pathos here.-Diane Tuccillo. Kit, a typical teenager, lives with her parents and younger brother, Buddy. Her life is a normal one with friends, boys, her brother, and baseball. Kit and Buddy, despite their eight-year age gap, are extraordinarily close. When Buddy develops cancer, however, Kit's life changes forever. Written in beautiful, sparse poetry, Rubber Houses is a heart-wrenchingly captivating novel.
McQuarrie, Oonagh. Voice of Youth Advocates. February 1, 2oo6.

Sixteen-year-old Kit's normal, happy life is over when her younger brother is diagnosed with leukemia. A feisty eight-year-old kid who loves baseball, Buddy is Kit's good friend and soul mate, one she is robbed of when he dies. Yeomans weaves the baseball metaphor throughout free-verse poems to trace Buddy's decline to the poignant conclusion, I'm calling the game. Yet the baseball year--and the book--is only half over. Kit and her parents struggle through postseason bereavement to spring training and develop a way of living without Buddy. The interesting plot structure works surprisingly well with both the topic and the narrative style. It also enhances the realistic portrayal of a family, grief stricken and out of balance, struggling to come back after a losing season.
Frances Bradburn, Frances. Booklist. January 1, 2007.

Awards

VOYA Best Poetry Picks

Suggestions for Use in Library

This novel is a good choice for the introduction of youth to the wide possibilities of use for poetry. It is not just for anthologies, nor is the narrative form of poetry restricted to the classic Greeks!