Showing results by narrator "Laurie Klein" in All Categories

Pinocchio is a naughty, disobedient wooden puppet that longs to grow up and become a real boy, but as long as he misbehaves and disappoints his father, old Gepetto, he is doomed and his dream will never be realized.

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?

As teens, Teague Blackwell and Wendie Keith starred in a popular television show, The Lost Romance Ranch. It was on the set that they first met, on the set that they first fell in love, and on the set that the two exchanged marriage vows. Fifteen years later, the show's title has taken on even greater meaning. For now Teague and Wendie are separated, with every intention of splitting up for good. Their plans, however, are not unfolding as they'd expected.

Jonathan and Ellen Ware have immigrated to the area from their farm in Illinois with 13-year-old Christy Ware and her two older brothers. The Wares are only one of the families that will soon be caught up in the burning issue of slavery with raids from the Border Ruffians out of Missouri and John Brown's small army devoted to ending slavery and helping runaways to escape to the north.

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.

All Abigail had to still her fears of the unknown were love, and trust in Ross Gallagher, the handsome, reckless Irishman who had snatched her from her New England family to make her his wife. But Abigail was soon to learn how frail even this man's strength and spirit were in the face of the dangers and terrors of the West. As a captive of a Sioux chieftain, Abigail was fated to experience a living hell.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“I would give my life for my children, but I wouldn’t give myself.” So said Edna Pontellier to her friend one summer as they sat beside the sea. It was the summer she learned to swim, fell in love, and awoke to the reality of her empty role in a loveless marriage. But she was a good wife. Edna dutifully returned home to the prison of her well-ordered life in New Orleans. Although close friends offered advice, the search for herself was a journey she must make alone. And in the end, Edna found herself returning to the sea where it all began.

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.

A legend on the frontier, only Ross could guide the wagon train that was taking them across the vast, unmapped continent. Born white, but raised as a mighty Sioux warrior, his desire for the golden-haired Marlette had taken him from his Indian people and left his soul divided. Now together, Ross and Marlette faced the unknown terrors of this great trek west...and a stirring destiny that would test the love and courage of both...

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.

She had the face of an angel, the will of a spitfire, and a mind of her own. Behind her was the slavelike existence in a Welsh mining town. Ahead, the promise of freedom in America, but to her horror, Eden Richards was soon to discover that slavery wears many disguises. The strict Mormon laws that could bend her to her will. The terrifying rites of the Sioux who had captured Eden and made her one of them. The lustful advances of the arrogant mine owner who would make her his prisoner.

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.

Four months have passed since Fred Nighthawk, a ranger for the Bureau of Land Management, vanished in Paiute Valley. Now, vandals have destroyed Indian petroglyphs in the remote area. Marcie Gibbs, an archeologist turned Special Agent for the BLM, is given her first assignment as an officer - look for a possible connection between the vandalism and Fred's disappearance.

Danielle Alexander's life has suddenly turned upside down. On a wagon train to California to join her fiance, her father falls terminally ill. Add to that a motherless newborn half-breed baby boy dropped literally into her arms by a wise, ancient Indian chief, who wants her to be the baby's mother "just until" her fiance comes to rescue her. Throw in, for good measure, a heady attraction to a handsome stranger named Joel Riley now making his fortune in the untamed west....

Cordelia Lu Hankins is the half Caucasian, half Chinese - and all albino. She has grown up in a remote lumber town with her distant father and a giant stepmother nicknamed Babe (after Paul Bunyan's blue ox), convinced she is ugly. Then, in the summer of 1918, when she is fourteen, she falls in love with the dashing Squirl. One day they meet on the mountain and Cordy receives her first kiss, as well as a wild ride down a log flume that gets Squirl fired.

She's running from a nightmare: Tess Sinclair must hide. Hunted by a powerful man who wants her dead, Tess flees her Texas home in search of anonymity, safety, and a new life. While a flat tire and stormy weather slow her escape, they prove the least of her worries. Just hours after her getaway, a hired gunman tracks her down. Grabbed in a parking lot, Tess is certain she'll be killed ... until a handsome hitchhiker intervenes. But can she trust the blue-eyed cowboy who appoints himself her guardian?