Showing results by author "Linda Hubalek" in All Categories

In this first book of the Trail of Thread series, in the form of letters she wrote on the journey, Deborah Pieratt describes the scenery, the everyday events on the trail, and the task of taking care of her family. Stories of humor and despair, along with her ongoing remarks about camping, cooking, and quilting, make you feel as if you pulled up stakes and are traveling with the Pieratts, too.

Lilly Lind was forced to emigrate from Sweden two years ago, due to circumstances beyond her control. She finds a job as a garment maker in the Brown Textile Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, finally feeling as though she is settling in her new country. Then a suspicious fire burns the mill, making Lilly seek another way to survive. She answers a mail-order bride ad in the Grooms' Gazette and sets off for Chicago, believing she will be a business owner's wife.

Listen to the fictionalized account of Kajsa Svensson Runeberg, an emigrant wife who recounts, through her diary, how she and her family built up a farm on the unsettled Kansas prairie from 1868 to 1888. This historical fiction is based on the actual Swedish woman who homesteaded the author's childhood home and is the first of the four book Butter in the Well series.

This first book in the Planting Dreams series portrays Swedish immigrant Charlotta Johnson as she ponders the decision about leaving her homeland, how they will travel to America, and worries about her family’s future in a new country.

Imagine surveying your farmstead on the last day of your life, reviewing the decades of joys, hardships, and changes that have taken place on the eighty acres you have called home for the past fifty years. Would you feel at peace or find remorse at the decisions that took place in your life? This third audiobook in the Planting Dreams series portrays Charlotta Johnson as she recalls the events that shaped her family's destiny.

Tying the Knot, the first historical fiction book in the Kansas Quilter series follows Kizzie Pieratt as she packs her family's belongings for her husband's job down in the Indian Territory. The move is meant to be temporary to make money to build a homestead back on their Kansas prairie land. As Kizzie receives trunks and quilts from her family to use on their trip, she learns about the significant moves previous generations have made for the betterment of their children, just like she is about to do.

The inevitable happens- time moves on and we grow older. Instead of our own little children surrounding us, grandchildren take their place. Each new generation lives in a new age of technology, not realizing the changes the generations before theirs has seen- and improved for them.

Follow the widowed Margaret Ralston Kennedy (a relative of the author) in this second book of the Trail of Thread series, as she travels with eight of her thirteen children from Ohio to the Territory of Kansas in 1855. Thousands of American headed west in the decade before the Civil War, but those who settled in Kansas suffered through frequent clashes between pro-slavery and free-state fractions that gripped the territory.

Can you imagine being isolated in the middle of treeless grassland with only a dirt roof over your head? Having to feed your children with whatever wild plants or animals you could find living on the prairie? Sweating to plow the sod, plant the seed, cultivate the crop-only to lose it all by a hailstorm right before you harvest it? This second book in the Planting Dreams series portrays Swedish immigrant Charlotta Johnson as she and her husband build a farmstead on the Kansas prairie.

Feel the uncertainty, doubt, and danger faced by the pioneer women of Kansas as they defend their homes and pray for their men during the Civil War. We think the Civil War took place in the South, but the Plains States endured their share of battles and tragedy. Not only did Kansas and Missouri experience a resurgence in the terrorist raids that had plagued them in the years before the war, but the Confederate Army tried several times to sweep across the Great Plains and capture the West.

Popular Kansas author Linda K. Hubalek continues the story of a Swedish immigrant family featured in the Butter in the Well series with the second book Prairie Bloomin'. Prairie Bloomin' features the 1889 to 1900 diary of daughter Alma Swenson, as she grows up on the farm her parents homesteaded. Even though born on the same farm in two different centuries, the main character of Prairie Bloomin', Alma Swenson Runneberg, and the author shared uncanny similarities while growing up in the Smoky Valley region of central Kansas.