The Great Brain Analysis

Adenville is a "typical Utah town" (1.2) of "twenty-five hundred people, of which about two thousand were Mormons and the rest Catholics and Protestants" (1.3). It's "typical"-ness just keeps comin...

Youngest Fitzgerald brother J.D. is the narrator, but the subject of his story is the middle brother, Tom, a.k.a. the Great Brain. Generally speaking, the title character is the main character, and...

The Great Brain centers on three brothers growing up in 1896. It's set in a real time long before our time, making it historical fiction. The boys range in age from seven to almost twelve, and thei...

The Great Brain blurs the lines between character and narrator. The character of J.D. is a seven-to-eight-year-old boy, but the narrator is an adult looking back at his childhood. Well, except when...

The Great Brain doesn't beat around the bush. J.D. gets right to the point in his narration, describing whatever's happening in a play by play. Even when he pauses to add his own commentary on even...

No need to have a great brain in order to figure out the significance behind The Great Brain as our book's title. It's Tom's nickname, and though J.D. narrates, the book is Tom's story. So the titl...

J.D. tells us that things got "mighty dull" (8.364) after the Great Brain's reformation. How dull? Papa doesn't even bother to find out where Tom is when suspicious things occur. Whoa. Just like th...

The Great Brain is a nice, breezy stroll along the beach. Every now and then we have to look past John D.'s eight-year-old interpretation of events to realize he's being had by his older brother, b...

Imagine Tom Sawyer Had a Gullible Little Brother…… and you have yourself the Great Brain. He's even named Tom. Our story begins in Adenville, Utah, in 1896, where the three Fitzgerald brothers...

The illustrator, Mercer Mayer, is best known for his "Little Critter" series of picture books. Tom and his brothers are basically just human versions of little critters running around getting into...

While clearly everyone in the book knows what goes on between a male and female dog when the female dog is in heat, we're pretty sure that the human males in this book still think girls have cooties.