Tagged: family

    Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died.A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories. Flora, her late mother's twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen. Their relationship and its fallout, played against a backdrop of a lost America will haunt Helen for the rest of her life.

  Sharing the spotlight can be difficult, especially when it’s with your sibling. We hear these stories all the time on TV, whether it’s Serena versus Venus Williams or John and Jim Harbaugh coaching against each other in the Super Bowl.

Essayist Leighann Camarero tells us about the personal connection she has with these competitive siblings when it comes to mom and dad having to choose who to support.

    In 1954, in a remote mountain village in South America, a little girl was abducted. She was four years old. Marina Chapman was stolen from her housing estate and then abandoned deep in the Colombian jungle. That she survived is a miracle. Two days later, half-drugged, terrified, and starving, she came upon a troop of capuchin monkeys. Acting entirely on instinct, she tried to do what they did: she ate what they ate and copied their actions, and little by little, learned to fend for herself.

  This Listener Essay by Barbara Redfield is entitled "A Man of Letters."

    Elizabeth Graver’s new novel, The End of the Point , is set in a summer community on Buzzard’s Bay from 1942 to 1999 and traces one family’s journey through the latter half of the 20th Century.

It examines the legacy of family and place and explores what we’re born into and what we pass down.