Showing results by narrator "Laurie Klein" in All Categories

This is the second story in the Anne of Green Gables series. Skinny little red-haired Anne has changed into a pretty 16-year-old and is all grown up - well, sort of grown up. The story opens with Anne as a school teacher at Avonlea school. When Anne reached the school that first morning, she was confronted by prim rows of "shining morning faces". She had sat up until nearly midnight composing a speech which she had revised and improved painstakingly. It was a wonderful speech with fine ideas. And then, she couldn't remember it!

Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert of Green Gables had no intention of adopting the talkative, mischievous, red-headed girl the orphanage in Nova Scotia sent by mistake. What they wanted was a sturdy, sensible boy to help with the chores. Instead, they got 11-year-old Anne Shirley, whose capacity for adventure was only matched by her bright spirit and love of life. Still, there was something about the little girl that gave them second thoughts. She was keen of wit with a scintillating effervescence that was purely captivating. Just perhaps....

In 1836, when she was nine years old, Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanche Indians. This is the story of how she grew up with them, mastered their ways, married one of their leaders, and became, in every way, a Comanche woman. It is also the story of a proud and innocent people whose lives pulsed with the very heartbeat of the land. It is the story of a way of life that is gone forever.

Anne is growing up and leaving the Island to spend four years of her life at Redmond College. She meets a wonderful new friend in Philippa Gordon, offspring to an old and exclusive "bluenose" family. Phil's family ties, combined with her beauty and charm, open the gates of all the social cliques and clubs at Redmond. And where Phil went, Anne went. Thus, Anne found her social pathway at Redmond made very easy while other freshettes were doomed to remain on the fringe of things.

This is a captivating, good-humored look at family life in a small farming community in Indiana in the early 1900s.

Tiana was a Cherokee woman. She grew up learning the magic, spells, and nature religion of her people. Before Sam Houston became the father of Texas, he was a young man who had run away from his home in Tennessee to live among the Cherokee. He came to love Tiana. As the Cherokee would say, she walked in his soul. But Sam was a white man, and Tiana, a Cherokee. And the dreams each had for their land and their people were far apart.

In a land where justice was found in the barrel of a gun and the line between outlaw and citizen was thinly drawn, two women struggled, fought, and won. Rebecca, the elder, beautiful and defiant, found herself in the majestic mountains of Utah, forced to marry a brutal polygamist. All she wanted was to become a physician - and a free woman. Katie, younger, innocent, passionate, risked her life so her sister might have a chance for freedom. She risked all to establish a sprawling sheep ranch and prove that a woman could do it all - on her own.

Twenty-year-old Halsey and 24-year-old Gertrude, nephew and niece of Rachel Inness, a well-to-do middle-aged spinster, talk Rachel into renting a large country house for the summer. Mysterious happenings occur the first night they are there, something or someone falls down the stairs in the middle of the night. A man is dead at the foot of the circular staircase. Now the question arises as to who he is and why was he in the house.

Cole Cantrell has no premonition that his life is about to change forever when he saves the life of a beautiful stranger. Still haunted by his wife’s death, he fights his growing attraction to the mysterious Stephanie, afraid that she belongs to another man. Stephanie has no memory of who she is or how she came to be in the middle of Wyoming Territory among strangers. Her only clues to the past are frightening dreams, a gold wedding band, and a confusing note that poses more questions than it answers.

Wyoming Territory in 1869 is no place for a woman, but when Kate Murphy's husband dies of Cholera, she is stranded there with no money and no way to leave. At the end of her rope, she accepts a job as a saloon girl in the tiny town of Horse Creek. There she is discovered by the mysterious Jonathan Cantrell who hires her to keep house for him and his two unruly sons. Jonathan has the face of an angel and the devil's own temper. But sweet Kate has a temper of her own and is more than a match for him.

Nicki Chandler was too busy fighting natural disasters on her homestead and trying to avert a range war to worry about romance. She was more likely to chase a man off at gunpoint than invite him in to tea. Then a handsome stranger with a mysterious past came looking for a job. In desperate need of a strong back to help with the work, Nicki reluctantly allowed him to stay, completely unprepared for the assault he would make on her heart.

Notorious outlaw Manitoba Joe Clark seems to have been caught red-handed this time, but he's begging Judge Kingston to find out who framed him. At home, life seems to be unraveling for the judge and his wife Judith. Will their widowed missionary son marry a most unlikely woman and return to India? Can evidence implicating Roberta's fiance as an embezzler and the father of an illegitimate child be true?

Winter 1914. Sara Lee Kennedy reads the newspaper account of the war in Europe and is appalled. Others in her sheltered Pennsylvania home are interested only in her coming marriage to solid, self-centered, Harvey. Struggling with compassion, Sara Lee feels compelled to help the suffering Belgian Army whose country is overrun by Germans. She defies her parents and travels alone to the front lines to help anyway she can. It is there she meets Henri, a Belgian officer.

Madsaw, war chief of the Tillamook tribe, kidnaps Twana, the step-daughter of the Nisqually shaman. Though their people are enemies, and to love a slave violates tribal law, Madsaw and Twana become lovers. Twana is endowed with an unusual power which allows her to mentally commune with animals and "see" them even though they are out of sight.

It's Christmastime in Skary, Indiana, but the holiday season has been hijacked by maverick director Lois Stepaphanopolis as she attempts to bring her horror-ific vision of A Christmas Carol to life. But the holly-decked path from page to stage is a thorny one, as Lois attempts to rally her skeptical cast, including new father Wolfe Boone, and then she learns that her reluctant marketing director, Alfred Tennison, is truly a Christmas Scrooge.

This is another beautifully crafted and nurturing Burnett tale about a young girl growing up, learning humility and compassion...the hard way. Sara Crewe’s young life is filled with wealth and pampering. But when her father dies in India and his wealth is lost, like a hot-house plant cast into the snow her life is reduced to shear survival. Turned into a beggar, her courage and strong-will are all she inherited from her father.

When spunky Swedish spinster Lili Tornquist, age 29, learns that her widowed father will soon remarry a woman she detests, she leaves her Minnesota home to become the mail-order bride of a distant cousin, Gunnar Jorgeson, a Montana sheep rancher. But her new husband falls far short of his promise, and putting aside all she has previously believed about steadfastness and endurance, Lili abandons her marriage to make her own way in the notorious wide-open mining town of Butte.

The discovery of a long-dead body in an abandoned refrigerator sends Ogeechee, Georgia, police officer Trudy Roundtree into the small town's past, where she uncovers rivalries, jealousy, and murder. When the body is identified as a young woman who was last seen more than 30 years earlier, shortly after a wedding shower in her honor, Trudy digs into secrets thought long buried.

Uprooted from a well-ordered life in Virginia when she was nine, Willa Cather came of age in the West during the last years of the American frontier. She developed a love for the beauty of the open grassland and an abiding interest in the Old World customs of her neighbors, the dreamers and builders who inhabit her fiction. This collection includes work from the early part of Cather''s career and clearly marks themes and landscapes that she would detail and explore for the remainder of her life.

Kansas is deeply split by the national conflict. Jonathan Ware and his wife are deeply troubled that their sons have enlisted on opposing sides of the conflict. The Wares and the other homestead families are subject to raids by renegades from both sides. When Jonathan Ware and Bishop Jardine are killed, the women are left without protection. Earlier Christy Ware and her father had discovered a hidden valley, opening out from an underground river.