Every year, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library serves millions of children, including around 85-thousand in Washington state. After the singer’s death, N-W-P-B’s Rachel Sun reached out to families in Washington and Idaho to ask about the impact those books made on them and their families. 
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Kaysie Morris lives in Clarkston, Washington, and has three children. She signed the two youngest up for the Imagination Library. Morris says reading together is an important family bonding activity.
1.  
MORRIS: “We've been getting to learn more about speech and reading and enjoying book time and everything every night with the books. And with my youngest being deaf, it's a good way to get all that vocabulary into her.”

Across the river in Lewiston, Idaho,  Lleshea Fuson [LEH-shay FEW-son] reads stories from the Imagination Library to her two children, Cirilla and Saren.
2.
FUSON: “Frankly, it was a very instrumental inclusion into our family dynamic …  I remember as a kid always loving bedtime stories, and I wanted to pass that on to my children, and her Imagination Library has helped that.” 

Wanda Sexton lives in Lewiston, too. She says she signed up her great-granddaughter, Allaina, for the Imagination Library a few years ago.  
3.
SEXTON: “...Mail would roll in for her, and she'd just get so tickled over it. And trying to explain to her who it was that was sending her these books --  she had no real concept of who Dolly Parton was or anything ….  But she just flat out decided that Dolly Parton must be her cousin, because she was the one sending her the books.

In Blaine, Washington, now-eight-year-old Stella Allison received braille books through the Imagination Library. Here’s her mom, Kyley Gehringer  [GEHR-ing-er].

3.5
KYLEY: “ It gave us that inclusion, and it, and it was a chance for Stella to get things that all other kids could get. But it gave it to her in a way that she could read through braille.”

Stella loves Dolly so much that when the family encountered a cardboard cutout of the singer at a local fair, Stella made an exception to one of her normal rules. Here she is talking with her stepdad, Alex Gehringer  [GEHR-ing-er]:
4.
STELLA: “I hate taking pictures.”
ALEX: “That's right. She hates standing still for pictures, but she said, ‘Yes, absolutely. I wanna get a picture with Dolly Parton.’”

Another Lewiston mom, Sara Alder, says books from the Imagination Library helped her connect with her son, Bjorn, who has autism and a speech delay.
5.
ALDER: “…You can really see it in his eyes when he's flipping through the pages. He likes to bring the books really close to his face, and he'll point at things, and he'll ask what they are. It just kind of provides a really nice calm interaction, especially when he's not able to articulate all that well how he's feeling about things. 
Alder says some of those books have been helpful in allowing her son to communicate. 
6.
ALDER: … Because he isn't, like I said, always able to articulate, wanting to interact with us, or he kind of wants to do his own thing. But reading's always been that thing that's allowed us to have an activity we can do together.”
Twenty-six-year-old Bree Latimer [LAT-eh-mer] is a grad student studying computer science at the  University of Louisville.
She grew up in Cottonwood, Idaho, and received books from the Imagination Library. 
7.
LATIMER: “So,  I actually struggled a lot with reading when I was a kid … and I think the biggest thing for me was not necessarily that I was the best reader, but I still loved reading. And I don't think that I would have had that love for reading if it weren't for my parents reading those stories to me when I was a kid.”

She says early exposure to those books helped grow her love of learning.

I’m Rachel Sun, reporting.