by Nancy Beal

Pamela Grant, aka Maggie Whittemore, brought her first published work to Peabody Memorial Library July 7 and read the introductory pages of Family Ties that Bind to a small but appreciative audience. The story is set in the early days of the frontier and features a young girl, Judy, who is orphaned at the age of seventeen, losing her mother and little brother to influenza and her father to a heart attack in the courtroom where he had just lost his farm in a bankruptcy proceeding.