My association with this author, Paula Stark, is a personal one – she is my sister.  This relationship gives me a special insight into her storytelling abilities and how she developed them.  As children, we waited anxiously for summer vacation: Like most kids, we enjoyed the summers for all the typical reasons – no school, some family trips, and plenty of free time to do whatever we wanted.  But what made our summers especially enjoyable was our weekly trip to the public library, a place where we could browse the shelves, touch the books, look at the pictures, and carefully choose the stories we would take home with us for reading.  The next week would find us lounging all around, reading about pirates, pets, and princesses.  We loved to share passages from the books we were each reading and talk about what intrigued or mystified us about the characters and their lives.  We especially liked to read the biographies of famous men and women who had accomplished amazing feats – Kit Carson, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Clara Barton, Abraham Lincoln, Babe Ruth, Cleopatra  – the list was extensive.  With books in hand, lying under the oak tree in the front yard or in the porch swing at Granny’s, we traveled through time and space on those lazy summer days.

So for my sister to be a teller of stories is no surprise to me.  She was destined to be an author whose focus is on children, whose purpose is to bring the enjoyment of   the printed word to young readers.  Her series of books, in which she gives the factual events of famous lives through her animal characters, is sure to foster a love of reading, as well as provide a snapshot of history.  My hope is that children will one day check her books out of the library and read them with the same joy and enthusiasm that we had for books so many years ago.