The Traveling Disease Author: Susan Woodring
Publisher: Main Street Rag Press
Publication Date: September, 2007
ISBN 13: 978-1-59948-067-1
Available at mainstreetrag.com  At the center of The Traveling Disease is young Pamela, a fatherless girl being raised by her mother, Thelma, a tortured if free spirit given to telling wild tales and lying, a woman who thinks little of abandoning her only daughter on the virtual doorstep of her own parents from whom she has been estranged for years.
What follows is Pamela attempting to navigate this new and hostile world, as well as a growing desire to discover what has happened to Thelma, both in the past and in the present. She struggles to adapt to a new life with her grandparents, Evelyn and Roy, who reach out to Pamela in their own clumsy, uncertain ways, while they continue to lament past disappointments over Thelma and present concerns over Thelma's younger sister Ann Marie, a troubled genius who indulges in self-destructive behaviors. In the course of her search, Pamela befriends Melody, a pregnant teenager who works at the laundromat, and Lloyd, an older man who knows the family's secrets. Throughout the story, Pamela watches the news bulletins about a local boy who has disappeared in the woods behind his house and memorizes facts about Christopher Columbus, whom she likens to her mother -- they both had an undeniable impulse to set sail, a traveling disease that could not be cured. In the end, Pamela rewrites her own story, much like the story of Columbus has been rewritten throughout history, and it is in this revision that she is finally able to reconcile the loss of her mother.
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