Linda K. Hubalek has 10 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators. The most-rated is Lilly: Bride of Illinois.
Harvesting Faith: Life on the Changing Prairie
Summary
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. A mixture of fact and fiction, based on the author's family, this audiobook reviews the events that shaped this Swedish immigrants family as her children reached adulthood and had families of their own. Join Charlotta as she reminisces about the important places and events in her past as she bids farewell to her mortal life on the Kansas prairie. Listeners compare Hubalek's books as a combination of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books, The Emigrants series by Vilhelm Moberg, and a Willa Cather novel.
©2012 Linda K. Hubalek (P)2014 Linda K. Hubalek
Trail of Thread: A Woman's Westward Journey
Summary
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. This series is based on author Linda K. Hubalek's ancestors that traveled from Kentucky to Kansas in 1854. Besides the history of the times, Hubalek weaves quilting facts and quilt pattern sketches in her book series.
©1995, 2010 Linda K. Hubalek (P)2013 Linda K. Hubalek
Stitch of Courage: A Woman's Fight for Freedom
Summary
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. Stitch of Courage, the third book in the Trail of Thread series, tells the story of the orphaned Maggie Kennedy, who followed her brothers to Kansas in the late 1850s. The niece of Margaret Ralston Kennedy, the main character in Hubalek's Thimble of Soil book, Maggie married the son of Deborah Pieratt, whose story was told in the Hubalek's Trial of Thread book. In letters to her sister in Ohio, Maggie describes how the women of Kansas faced the demons of the Civil War, fighting bravely to protect their homes and families while never knowing from one day to the next whether their men were alive or dead on the faraway battlefield.
©1996 LInda K. Hubalek (P)2013 Linda K. Hubalek
Looking Back
Summary
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. The cycle of life has changed the prairie also. The endless waves of tall native prairie grass have been reduced to uniform rows of grain crops. The curves of the river had shifted over the decades, eroded by both man and nature. The majestic prairie has been tamed over time.
©1994, 2010, 2012 Linda K. Hubalek (P)2014 Linda K. Hubalek
Thimble of Soil
Summary
Follow the widowed Margaret Ralston Kennedy (a relative of the author) in this second audiobook 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. Told through her letters, Thimble of Soil describes the prevalent hardships and infrequent joys experienced by the hardy pioneer women of Kansas, who struggled to protect their families from terrorist raids while building new homes and new lives on the vast unbroken prairie. Margaret was dedicated to the cause of the North, and while the male members of her family were away fighting for a free state, she valiantly defended their homestead and held their families together through the savage years of Bleeding Kansas. Experience the terror of the fighting and the determination to endure as you stake a claim alongside the women caught in the bloody conflicts of Kansas in the 1850s.
©2010 Linda K. Hubalek (P)2014 Linda K. Hubalek
Planting Dreams
Summary
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. This book series is based on the author's ancestors, and contains actual maps of where they traveled and settled. Each chapter is written as a thought-provoking story as the wife of the family travels to a new country to find a new life for her children. Why did this family leave? Drought scorched the farmland of Sweden and there was no harvest to feed families or livestock. Taxes were due and there was little money to pay them. But there were ships sailing to America, where the government gave land to anyone who wanted to claim a homestead. Can you imagine starting a journey to an unknown country, not knowing what the country would be like, where you would live, or how you would survive? Did you make the right decision to leave in the first place? Follow Charlotta and her family as they travel by ship and rail from their homeland in 1868, to their homestead on the open plains of Kansas.
©1997, 2010, 2012 Linda K. Hubalek (P)2013 Linda K. Hubalek
Butter in the Well
Summary
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.
©2012 Linda K. Hubalek (P)2014 Linda K. Hubalek
Cultivating Hope
Summary
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. This family faced countless challenges as they homestead on America's Great Plains during the 1800s. Years of hard work develop the land and improve the quality of life for her family - but not with a price.
©1998 Linda K. Hubalek (P)2013 Linda K. Hubalek
Prairie Bloomin'
Summary
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. Both the third child of their families, they lived in the same house, played in the same yard and worked the same acres until each married and moved off the farm.
©1993 Linda K. Hubalek (P)2013 Linda K. Hubalek
Lilly: Bride of Illinois
Summary
A sweet, wholesome romance set in 1890. 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. Kansas rancher Seth Reagan travels to the Union Stockyards in Chicago to attend the 1890 American Fat Stock Show, the American Horse Show, and to purchase horseflesh to augment his herd. When arriving at the train station, he overhears a conversation between a young woman and a shady-looking man. Seth becomes concerned for the mail-order bride who is whisked away to a saloon, not to her new husband's home. When Seth goes to the saloon to check on the young woman, he finds her in trouble and offers to help her escape. While buying horses and arranging their return travel to Kansas, Seth realizes he would like to bring Lilly home with him, too, but she is still being hunted by the saloon owner's thugs. Lilly's good fortune in meeting Seth makes her want to start a life with this man, but he came to Illinois for horses, not a bride. Would he want her after he learns of her secrets?
©2015 Linda K. Hubalek (P)2016 Linda K. Hubalek