["Does This School Have Capital Punishment?" is] a sentimental fantasy, complete with good guys who need to learn compassion, bad guys who turn out to have soft hearts and a fairy godfather in the form of a great old black jazz musician.
It is improbable, to say the least, that a renowned trumpeter named Major Kelley would travel from New York to Chicago to help a bright, smart-alecky white kid beat an unfair accusation of marijuana possession—and then buy a cake inscribed "INNOCENT" to celebrate the victory for the boy…. But then almost everything in this book is a little unreal. Both kids and teachers at tough, exclusive Burr Academy are impossibly clever; Major Kelley is often impossibly oracular; and any character can in an instant become a mouthpiece for a minilecture (thoroughly worthy, mind you) on why jazz should be taught in the schools or why it feels better to tell the truth. The creepy kid who pins the bum rap on Sam is impossibly victimized by a newspaper-tycoon father who's a moustache-twirling capitalist villain … and so on.
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