Survivors

Survivors tells the story of a close-knit family in West Virginia in 1972 -- a family tested by the death of favorite son Cory, the golden-boy of whom much was expected. The family is learning to cope with the shutdown of the glass-bottle plant, the primary means of employment in their small town -- leaving parents, Bud and Lola MacLean, jobless."Survivors" refers to each member of the MacLean family, each dealing with Cory's untimely death. Bud and Lola deny that Cory was their favorite, yet each knows that he was and must deal with the accompanying guilt. Cory's siblings must learn to live with his loss and with their own demons: Joan (a grown daughter who works in the VA Hospital, trying to heal Vietnam veterans, trying to heal her family's grief), Mike (also grown, but usually jobless, and drilling, volatile, resentful); and the youngest, Stephan (a junior in high school, who looked up to Cory as an example, a protector and the most-perfect of his siblings). It is Stephan who is tested the most by Cory's loss. He feels resentful of his parents' shifting of expectations, and the idea that now he must be Cory.But surviving also means traveling the treacherous roads of economically-stressed times, in a town whose future is dim. And getting by in a country struggling to put Vietnam behind it while beginning to deal with Watergate -- a country surviving the loss of its innocence and sense of invincibility.Valerie Nieman is the author of 'Survivors' with ISBN 9781929871025 and ISBN 1929871023.