Rubber Houses by Ellen Yeomans

From the Publisher

Typical teenager Kit lives a happy, normal life of friends, boys, and loving family. She and her younger brother, Buddy, are incredibly close despite their eight-year age difference, bonded by a shared love of baseball and math.

But when Buddy is taken suddenly by cancer, Kit and her parents struggle to survive. Told in spare, lyrical verse, Rubber Houses is a powerful novel that perfectly captures the intense and excruciating pain of the loss of a loved one, and the slow but gradual hope of living again and finding one's way back home.

VOYA

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.

KLIATT

The jacket copy claims this is Yeomans's first novel. To call it a novel is a stretch, as the narration is a series of poems that are like snapshots of the grieving process rather than a continuous narrative. Seventeen-year-old Kit, who adores her younger brother Buddy and shares with him a love of math and baseball, must, along with her parents, deal with Buddy's diagnosis of cancer, his subsequent illness, his death, and her movement towards healing. Perhaps the book's intent can best be likened to Tennyson's series of poems about the death of his best friend, Arthur Hallam. The poetry here is free verse in generally short lines, accessible, imagistic. Many references to map-making and trip-taking (Kit loves to plan imaginary trips with maps given to her by the American Automobile Association) along with references to the seven stages of the grief process suggest, not too originally, that dealing with loss is a journey. Kit, at first, rejects this metaphor as being too easy, and makes all the mistakes and suffers all the pain that must come as the result of loss. She rejects her friends, seeks numbness in sleep, finds herself ranting at unexpected moments in the school cafeteria, and listens to her parents weep and argue. She comes to realize that grief is a journey, a painful one that must be taken no matter how much one resists the first step.

Children's Literature

Kit must deal with the loss of her younger brother to cancer. They were very close and had shared common interests of baseball and math. Written in prose, many situations and the emotions tied to them are revealed. In grief she rejects her best friend again and again, wanting the friendship but not knowing how to share her grief. So afraid of infecting each other with their own raw emotions, Kim and her parents separate themselves. Kim is unable to comfort her brother's best friend and take on his pain. She had studied hard and researched colleges but now thinks her friends are foolish for planning ahead. The analogies of baseball and travel are expertly woven into death, playing the game of life, escape and hope. This is an excellent book. It is not necessarily for those who experience loss, but for the rest of us to see what is really important in life, to be present, and to be there when someone needs us.

VOYA

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 also 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.

Kirkus Reviews

Continuing her thematic preoccupation with death, Yeomans creates a free-verse diary for 17-year-old Kit's year-long period of grief, guilt and ultimate coping strategy following the loss of her nine-year-old brother Buddy to cancer. Juxtaposed with baseball terminology, Buddy's first love and obsession, the poems are divided into five sections imitating the year-long cycle of the sport: "Warm-Ups, ‘Regular' Season, Postseason, Hot Stove, Spring Training." Sad, often depressing and achingly difficult to read with sustained interest, Buddy's illness and death are described in the first two sections followed by Kit's long, drawn-out feelings of despair, anger and general lack of concern for her own future without her little brother. Finally, as with the promise of each new "Spring Training," Kit finds refuge and recovery working as a clerk in the local hardware store, renews neglected friendships and resolves at least to begin her higher education at the local community college. Perhaps a little too cathartic and personal, Yeomans's symbolic use of the happy American pastime is discordant with the somber and grave issue of premature death. Dismal reading. (Fiction. YA)

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