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    Rubber Houses: Love and Loss, Grief and Recovery - Easy Has its Season, Each is Part of the Game
    Rubber Houses: Love and Loss, Grief and Recovery - Easy Has its Season, Each is Part of the Game
    Rubber Houses: Love and Loss, Grief and Recovery - Easy Has its Season, Each is Part of the Game
    Audiobook1 hour

    Rubber Houses: Love and Loss, Grief and Recovery - Easy Has its Season, Each is Part of the Game

    Written by Ellen Yeomans

    Narrated by Chelsea Mixon and Full Cast

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Kit is a typical teenage girl happily engaged in school and family life. She and her younger brother, Buddy, are deeply bonded. Despite their age difference, they're connected by a love of baseball and math. Then Kit learns that Buddy has been diagnosed with cancer.

    The poems that follow capture both devastating loss and the beginnings of recovery in spare, lyrical verse that throbs with raw emotional power.

    ©2007 Ellen Yeomans; (P)2009 Full Cast Audio

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFull Cast Audio
    Release dateJan 1, 2009
    ISBN9781934180808
    Rubber Houses: Love and Loss, Grief and Recovery - Easy Has its Season, Each is Part of the Game

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    Reviews for Rubber Houses

    3.5/5

    24 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Rubber Houses is a roller coaster of emotions as author Ellen Yeomans poetically unveils the pain and suffering in grieving the loss of a loved one. A tight-knit family, whose closeness is unified in numbers and a love for baseball, is depicted early in this story. The unity and comfort in the family is easily identifiable, but when the youngest member Buddy (a fourth grader) is diagnosed with cancer and quickly deteriorates the family begins to crumble. For his 17 year-old sister, Kit, witnessing her brother’s fight with cancer and death is beyond heart wrenching. Kit’s desire to live and optimism for a better day is shadowed by her guilt and fear of living without her brother. Her parents are consumed by the death: living through the motions, checked out, and blank. They have become absentee parents to Kit. In this raw account of what an unexpected and unaccepted death does to a family, readers will experience the stages of grief with Kit and her parents. Masterfully constructed, Yeomans writes this novel in free verse and divides the book into a year-long break down of baseball (Warm-ups, Regular Season, Post Season, Hot Stove and Spring Training). This metaphor to grieving, in its honest portrayal, will leave readers hoping for healing for everyone involved. Rubber Houses is a great book to have in any YA collection. Age Appropriate: 15 years and olderThis book could be a good read for a student grieving the death of someone and is struggling to go through the grieving process. With that said, due to the content, this book might be inappropriate for someone who has just lost a loved one.
    • 3/5
      Although it’s not easy to tell by looking at the cover art, Rubber Houses is a book about baseball, loss, and recovery. (Rubber Houses refers to the shape of baseball’s home plate, and the “O” in the title cover art is actually a home plate) Sophomore, Kit, has a special relationship with her younger brother Buddy, predicated on their mutual love of baseball. In touching free verse poems, Kit reveals the story of Buddy’s struggle and losing battle with the “game” of cancer. The poems are grouped together in baseball themed chapters – Warmups, Preseason, Regular Season, etc. Far from being maudlin, it is an uplifting story as she recounts her love for Buddy, her descent into depression and her eventual recovery. Two of my children are of similar age and temperament and share the same love for each other and baseball, so I found the book particularly affecting. This book may not have wide appeal, but it’s well-written, and ultimately, life-affirming.