I thought I was in the mood for something other than a kids’ book, but I was, perhaps, wrong. I just moved on Sunday: not far, just four blocks, from one apartment to another within the same neighborhood. As moves go, in the grand scheme of moving possibilities, it was an easy one. But it’s the first time I’ve moved since I graduated college, and I didn’t realize quite how much more work it is to pack/move a whole apartment (pantry! large quantities of dishes! pots and pans! cast-iron skillet!) than it is to pack/move a single room’s worth of stuff. So: I have been a bit frazzled, and now I’m mostly unfrazzled but am pretty busy with the unpacking and deciding where everything goes and settling in, and I just wanted a nice easy read, which this is.
The Great Brain is set in Utah in 1896 (the main characters are not Mormon but lots of their neighbors are), and centers around Tom D. Fitzgerald, who is ten years old and is always talking about his “great brain” and how it’s going to make him a millionaire. The story’s narrated by JD, Tom’s younger brother, and it’s sweet, though at first I found it hard to get into. The characters’ speech often seemed stilted, like the author was cutting down on his use of contractions in order to make things sound more old-fashioned, but it just ended up sounding unnatural. But once I got past that and into the story, I enjoyed it well enough. Tom is rather Tom Sawyer-ish – not so much in the laziness department (though sometimes that!) but definitely in the scheming-to-get-things-he-wants department: in the first chapter, he decides to send his brother out to the street with a sign and a cowbell as a barker, with the idea that they’ll charge other kids in town a penny each to come see the new indoor toilet their dad’s just installed, which is the first indoor toilet the town has. But he’s not entirely selfish: he saves the day when two local kids get lost in a cave, befriends a Greek kid who gets beat up by everyone else, and teaches a kid with a peg leg how to run and play again.
The historical details of this book are often pleasing: I liked the description of the general store (a branch of the Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution), and the mention of kids playing games like Heavy Heavy Hangs Over Your Head (I had to look that one up), and chaw-raw-beef (had to look that up too) and color-coded quarantine signs hanging on houses where kids have the mumps or measles. One semi-complaint: the almost complete lack of girls in this book! There are grown-up women, there’s a girl at school who gets a frog put in her desk, there are two girls playing hopscotch … and that’s it! I guess I can’t complain too much: lots of the books I read as a kid didn’t have many boys in them, and this is the same but with the focus on a different gender. Still: while this book was sweet, I don’t think I’ll be reading any of the other books in this series.
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