Stories Come to Life

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life! I would love to hear from you, so please send me an email at kluker@marshallpl.org. It would make me so happy!  Listening to audiobooks really does count as reading, and there's no better way to relax than to hear Stories Come to Life! Let me know what you think! Please send an email to me at kluker@marshallpl.org. I'd love to hear from y...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. In the last episode, Mr. Downing, the church warden, told his wife he intended to listen with the strictest impartiality to the girls’ side of the story concerning those terrible Milligans. But does he listen? Not at all! He is more concerned with noticing all the little homey details the girls have added to the...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. When dear Grandma Pike moved away, the girls wondered and wondered who their new neighbors would be. Finally, they arrived: a man and his wife, a boy, a girl (about the age of the four cottagers), a baby, and a dog! How wonderful it would be to have a new friend, and a new baby to play with! But oh, those Millig...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. This is an episode of departures. First there is lovely Miss Blossom, the three-week lodger in Dandelion Cottage. But alas, three weeks passes so quickly and before the girls know it, Miss Blossom has to leave. Then Grandma Pike, who lives next door, moves away to live with her married daughter. Then Mr. Brown i...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. Can you imagine furnishing a whole house, well, a cottage, with old, cast-off furniture and cracked dishes and a couch that is really just burlap spread over boxes? That is what Bettie, Mabel, Jean, and Marjory are doing, and they are having the time of their lives! If only they had a little bit of money so they...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. When I was a little girl, my dad built a playhouse under a big blue spruce tree for my sisters and me. I spent hours and hours playing in it. I swept the floor and decorated it with pictures I drew and flowers I picked in the alley. What wonderful memories I have of that little playhouse! In this book, four girl...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. Ben Mason has faced so many obstacles as he has tried to make his place at Clearview Academy. He was assigned extra work so he would appear to be out of condition, he was able to save the life of a teammate and fainted from the loss of blood as a result, and now he is enduring a punishment after being falsely su...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. When I was visiting my parents a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was reading The Winning Basket on this podcast. Pleased, Dad shared with me this poem that seems very fitting for Ben’s tale. It is one of the poems in a book called Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle , which is an anthology of poet...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. Here is some amazing basketball! With Ben on the team, the Clearview Academy cadets have the opportunity to win and win and win. But tensions inside of the team seem to be pulling the squad apart. What in the world can Ben do to make the team start to click again? As always, Ben seems to be at the right place at...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. Now as a member of the Clearview Academy basketball squad, Ben Mason knows this gives him a chance to prove to the rest of the school that he is worthy to be one of them. He plays with all his heart and tries to motivate his teammates to play their best as well. When they face their first contest, with Corona Sc...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. Now Ben has to work for his living, in order to have enough money to live until Clearview Academy returns his tuition and he can decide what else he can do to make his start in life. Because he is a good mechanic with a level head, he thinks of some ways to speed up the production in the valve assembly part of t...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. When I was growing up, I would often go down the basement where my dad had set up bookshelves that he made into a library. I would scan the shelves, searching for something interesting to read. Over the years, I read many, many of those books, some of them several times. Two books I remember that were always she...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. Here is the thrilling conclusion of The Enchanted Barn, by Grace Livingston Hill. Somehow that old stone barn must actually have some magical enchantment to it because none of the Hollisters or the Grahams will ever be the same again after falling under its influence. But is it actually the barn that caused the...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. What is happening to Shirley? In this episode, brave Shirley Hollister shows the ingenuity of Nancy Drew and the courage of a valiant knight as she does her best to protect her top-secret shorthand notes from being taken by a gang of ruthless criminals. Her quick-witted strategies soon involve Sidney Graham as w...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. It’s time for Shirley Hollister’s two-week vacation, and what an amazing opportunity is coming to their family! Mr. and Mrs. Graham have invited the Hollisters to take their daughter, Elizabeth, to their shore-house for the month of September while Mr. and Mrs. Graham visit out West. It will be the first time Sh...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. At the ending of the last episode, Sidney Graham has gone out West to conduct some business for his father. He went to investigate some mines. The Hollisters weren’t neglected, though, and each member of the family living in the barn received some token that he had been thinking of them. Surprisingly, this is wh...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. What a wonderful life it is for the Hollister family! They wake up to the birds’ vibrant dawn chorus, enjoy the fresh country air, and can watch the sunset at night, all from the comfortable, homey stone barn! Sidney Graham and his sister are frequent guests at the barn, and even the fashionable Mrs. Graham is c...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. The furniture is in place, an old denim cloth that used to be a floor covering has been patched and cleaned and hung up as a curtain, the piano is in the corner of the new living room in the barn, and everything is ready for the Hollisters to move in. Kind Elizabeth Graham has one more welcoming surprise for the...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. Not only are Shirley, Carol, and George Hollister charmed by the big old barn, but Sidney and Elizabeth Graham can see the possibilities too. The elegant Graham siblings are also charmed by the humble and steadfast Hollisters, too, and they are determined to make the barn as welcoming and comfortable as possible...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. What about that big, beautiful barn? First Shirley, and then Sidney Graham have explored it and found it to be a charming, peaceful place. Shirley would really like her brother George and sister Carol to see the place before she makes any firm decisions about whether to move their little family there to live. Ca...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. In 1918, as World War I was raging in Europe and the tragedy of the Spanish Flu epidemic was beginning to sweep across the world, the writer Grace Livingston Hill published her thirty-third book. The Enchanted Barn is a story about a charming, courageous, and forthright girl named Shirley Hollister. Brave and re...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. “The Celestial Omnibus,” by E. M. Forster is one story in a larger collection published in 1911, and therefore happily in the public domain. Oh, how I love this short story! I think some of the things I like about it is that it reassures me that we don’t have to know all the details and obscure meanings of a poe...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. When Betsy’s kitten, Eleanor, starts avoiding the house and spending most all of her time in the barn, Betsy follows her one day and finds Eleanor’s wonderful surprise, nestled into the hay up in the loft! At this same time a letter arrives from Aunt Frances that seems it will change, once again, the course of B...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker. If Aunt Frances could see Betsy now, she probably wouldn’t recognize her! Betsy is becoming a compassionate, kind, and very clever young girl. She is developing a real friendship with Ralph, whom she used to be frightened even to be near, and she is like a little mother to sweet young Molly. She is also very bra...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to Stories Come to Life. I am your host, Kathryn Lopez Luker.  Betsy is learning so much at the Putney farm! In addition to helping out around the kitchen and learning to sew, Betsy is also learning compassion and how to care for others. She even has to figure out how to save little Molly when she falls into the Wolf Pit! How can she still be the same timid little girl who...