The Great Brain Series

The Great Brain is the story of Tom Fitzgerald, a boy growing up in a small Utah town in the 1890s who is smarter than every adult around him and is not remotely shy about it. I loved these books because Tom was not the conventional hero—he was not the fastest or the strongest or the most virtuous. He was the one who thought. He outmaneuvered people. He saw angles that others missed. At an age when I was already different from my peers—always reading, always thinking about things they were not thinking about—there was something deeply satisfying about a protagonist who wore his intelligence as his defining characteristic rather than hiding it. These books told me that being the smartest person in the room was something to be proud of.