Three years ago I started thinking that a pandemic was just around the corner. I was expecting a childhood disease, such as diphtheria, to return. As I talked to some nurses and doctors about the idea, they assured me that such a thing was impossible because everyone gets a tetanus vaccine, which also includes protection against diphtheria. The subject occupied my thoughts as it challenged me to research the disease. I came to realize that a few scattered cases were showing up in different parts of the world. Because members of my family had suffered from the disease, I had a personal reason to be interested.
Courage Is a Redhead, a combination of two stories—one set in future times with a dystopian flair and an epidemic of diphtheria and the other in the early twentieth century when the epidemic of diphtheria that had been around for years continued to plague the South, even though a cure had been developed years earlier—is a book I released last year.
A welcome surprise…..unlike any other book that Mary Lou has written. It combines great imagination of the future with history from the past to create interesting fiction “based on facts from Mary’s youth.”–Sarah Walker Gorrell
The author’s mother told her about the horror of diphtheria, a disease that could return to plague the earth. Now as we suffer the Covid pandemic, some of the events in this novel appear to be prophesy. Read Courage Is a Redhead to gain a realistic look at intubation being performed in a field hospital.
An environmental scientist, who serves as an ambassador of the United States to the world at large, overcomes attacks using biological weapons and confronts a tyrant who has started a revolution. She gains help from her mother, whom she rescues from peril, and from information found in old letters from her grandmother.