Curing Ebola?

Hey guys, it's Adventure Van with some uplifting news! The Ebola epidemic has been been a widespread panic and cause of death across the world, but due to some recent breakthroughs, the fatality rate can be dropped by as much as from 70% to 29%! This becomes even smaller if the treatments are done swiftly after signs show, making it fall down to roughly 6% percent! That's amazing news and will help save thousands of lives!

Adventure Van, signing out.

Flight Book Report

Adventure Van here with a blog on Flight by Sherman Alexie. Flight is a book about an indigenous foster kid named Zits who goes through several traumatic experiences across time before finally returning to his actual time. After being manipulated by a kid named Justice, he makes a very dangerous decision due to his feelings of prejudice towards both his own race and others. However, after this results in his 'death', he instead begins jumping from person to person who had a role in the attacks and war that the united states of america waged against native american Indians. It's a very informative, heart wrenching yet somewhat enjoyable book. Honestly, it's still very relevant about our treatment of everyone whom isn't Caucasian.

Adventure Van, signing off.

Maximum Ride Book Report

Maximum Ride is a graphic novel done by James Patterson about a small group of teenagers and younger kids with wings and other powers who are on the run from a secret shadowy organization. That seems to be quite a common theme in young adult books, for some strange reason. It was somewhat interesting, but also just a bit normal. It didn't really have any interesting plot from what I could tell in the first book, except for a twist at the very end that still didn't add much of a sidestep. However, the art style was decent and had a good amount of detail, so I really enjoyed the art more then the actual story. It isn't something I'd recommend to anyone in particular.

Adventure Van, slightly let down.

Zoo (Book Report)

Hey guys, it's Adventure Van here with a blog about Zoo, a graphic novel written by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge, drawn by Andy MacDonald. It's an interesting book with a disturbing idea of the apocalypse and how mankind and governments would likely fail at changing the outcome successfully. The main character, Oz, is a biologist who is utterly ignored multiple times by the government in his several years of speaking about HAC, Human Animal Conflict. At the start of the book, however, the thing he has been warning about comes to reality, and mammals across the world become much, more aggressive. The largest threat to salvation, however, isn't the incoming attacks, but government and bureaucracy. Time and time again, Oz is held up or ignored by government officials, and even after his bandage to the problem is instated, it is almost immediately broken by those in power anyway. It's a well done novel that accurately shows how most scientific problems are ignored by those who benefit from ignoring it.

Adventure Van, signing out.

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

Hey guys, it's Adventure Van here with a blog on The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, written by E. Lockhart. I read it for the Mayor's Reading Challenge. It's a book about the title character, Frankie Landau-Banks, as she takes revenge on a boys club for it not accepting her as a member. It's set in a private high school with a fairly normal, cliche group of children. The book follows the misadventures of Frankie as she tries to make it through her relationship problems, her internalized anger at people, and being fairly psychopathic and malevolent. To be honest, I did not enjoy this book. It wasn't that it was bad, I just felt that the characters were forced and a bit contrived, and the plot was a bit weird and distant, but that didn't seem like the intention of the author. It's said to be a pro feminist book, but this is done in horrible lighting which just shows one person ripping at a group, instead of either having a group of people work together to change things. It just seems violent, and without any moral or positive consequence.

Frankie doesn't change her personality much through the book. She stays the same, and it's not a good baseline to be at. She's distant, self centered, willing to cut anyone down in order to get an edge, and is pretty meh at being one to fall into a heroic archetype. She ends up destroying relationships of others and pushing out several of her friends and her boyfriend through how she deals with the fact that she wasn't allowed into the 'boys-club'. And it isn't out of equality. She believes that she's better than everyone else, and her attacks on the club only result in their friendships being damaged and the club hating her when they find out. The admittance of the club doesn't change, and all that happens is that she just proves that she was able to outsmart people. It's not a real goal for someone to root for.

I can't tell what the intention of the book is. It's framed as a pro-feminist book, but it acts less around resolving the gender differences (Never once does Frankie or really any other female actually interact and help each other out in a meaningful way, and there's plenty of stereotypical back-biting between them), and more just proving that one singular person was able to outsmart a small group of close friends by pretending to be one of their close friends. It's a mediocre book, one that I would not recommend reading myself.

Adventure Van, signing out.