The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald
illustrated by Mercer Mayer.
A gem, truly. A picture of a time and a place and three absolutely unique boys with a father who bought the town's first indoor water closet. Tom, the Great Brain of the title, proceeds to sell kids a demo of "the indoor backhouse that doesn't stink." Until he gets found out and has to give the money back.
Some of his escapades succeed, helped by the devoted (or extorted) silence of his brothers. And some fail a few times before they succeed, like the time when he decided to get rid of the mean schoolteacher who paddles him. But if there's anything this kid has, it's grit. He learned to try and keep on trying--success gets to be a habit, as Pa Ingalls says in an entirely different kids book
It's still a kid's book, not a teen book...but now I wonder if Ms. Skurnick's book was maybe mislabeled "teen" by a misguided publisher. I've heard of such things.
But I absolutely adore The Great Brain. And I cried at the end. And I really wished I'd read it to my kids, as several commentators on amazon.com are doing right now.
Oh, and I recognized the illustrator's name, Mercer Mayer, but couldn't quite place him--he's the illustrator of the Little Critter series. We loved those books!
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