The Great Brain at the Academy
No. 4 in The Great Brain series
by John D. Fitzgerald
illustrated by Mercer Mayer
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Bantam Doubleday Dell (New York): 1972. Trade paperback: 164 pages. ISBN-10: 0-440-43113-1 Suggested retail price: $4.50 (US) Tags: boys; candy; Catholic church; private schools; Salt Lake City; Utah; Youth Tactical strength: [6/10] |
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Tom, the Great Brain, goes off to private Catholic school in Salt Lake City. His hometown of Adenville, Utah, doesn't have school beyond the sixth grade, so Tom and his brother Sweyn go to a private school to further their education. Tom gets into a lot of trouble at first as he butts heads with the Jesuit priests that run the school, but Tom matures a bit as he learns the priests really have the boys' best interests at heart. Tom's growth doesn't stop him from making a fortune while at the academy. He opens a candy store, and he makes several bets in which he wins money from just about every other student. He does do some good as well by getting basketball introduced as an athletic outlet for the boys who previously had no sports outlet other than daily calisthenics.
Fitzgerald has a clean, precise style that flows well. I did find a lot of destriptive repetition in this volume that distracted me from the narrative. We expect to hear about "the great brain" a lot, but in this book, Fitzgerald starts to describe Tom's "money-loving heart" as the explanation for Tom's greed. Fitzgerald uses this over and over to excess, so that by the end of the book, this phrase would pull me right out of the narrative. Also the boys, including Tom, do a lot of leveraging with peer pressure. Tom uses the threat of exposing a boy as a coward or tattletale as leverage to get the boys to do his bidding. I'm sure boys twelve to fourteen years old don't have a lot of manipulative tools, but you would think the Great Brain could come up with some other means of getting his way.
Overall, The Great Brain at the Academy makes a good contribution to the entire series and sets up the maturation Tom experiences in the later volumes.
