The Great Brain/YMMV

• Complete Monster: Cal Roberts truly takes the cake as a vile, loathsome individual.
• Crowning Moment of Awesome: In book 5, when JD arranges to put Tom on trial for being a con man, and Harold Vickers, JD's choice for judge, proceeds to shoot down all of Tom's Insane Troll Logic and finally puts him in his place after 4 books of jerkassery.
• Magnificent Bastard: One could make a case for Cal Roberts. As vile of a man as he is, the level of planning he put into trying to kill the Judge, DA, and J.D.'s father is impressive. Even more impressive, he pretty much saw through any attempt to separate him from Frankie or to kill him without getting Frankie killed in the process, and very well may have succeeded in murdering the poor kid if he wasn't caught in a truly unexpected way.
  • And of course, there's the Great Brain himself, who regularly makes even adults look like complete fools during his various schemes.
• Moral Event Horizon: A lot of the local kids felt that Tom crossed this after he nearly got a group of boys killed on his raft for the sake of pulling in some money.
  • For a straighter example, there's Cal Roberts attempting to murder poor Frankie Pennyworth when he failed to kill his intended targets.
• Tear Jerker: Quite a few, particularly one chapter wherein Frankie's toy horse is stolen. The culprit: a dirt farmer who couldn't afford one for his son. The boy is diabetic, which in those days was a death sentence. On learning the reason, Frankie just asks him to take good care of it. The boy died a year later.
• Values Dissonance: Seeing as how the books are set over a century ago this is bound to apply to any modern day reader. One particularly egregious example comes in the third book when JD delivers an intense spanking to his adoptive four year old brother Frankie. In the story the spanking ends up being cathartic for Frankie and it helps him to recover from the trauma of his parent's death. Most people today would realize that this is not the way to help a traumatized child.
• Wangst: JD's almost constant self-deprecation of his Butt Monkey status.