Leaving Home Trilogy

WORSHIP OF HOLLOW GODS depicts the family norms, rituals, and religious routines of a Catholic, Polish, Detroit family in the 1950's. Through beautiful language, the characters step off the page. In WORSHIP OF HOLLOW GODS, James Sniechowski bears witness to the world of a sensitive, nine-year-old boy, subjected to the underbelly of his Polish Catholic family in working class Detroit. The year is 1950. The family gathers for a Friday night family poker/pinochle party. The outcome reveals a world no one ever talked about then and are forbidden to talk about now- -the unspoken, the impermissible, the reality beneath every family's practiced facade--and what lies beneath when the front has been ripped away. Sniechowski unsparingly yet compassionately evokes the temptations, trials, and tactics of the family characters while revealing the hollow gods they naively but fatefully worshipped. Readers, no matter where in the world, will be prompted if not pushed to confront the hollow gods that reside, like living ghosts, in the unseen of their family's way of life , the invisible that sources and shapes their beliefs and behaviors. WORSHIP OF HOLLOW GODS dredges up familial bonds that grip and hold tight, unconsciously dictating our destiny. It is story telling at its caring and compelling best.

Journey with Jim through An Ambition to Belong, second book of master novelist Jim Sniechowski's Leaving Home Trilogy. This is an astute and insightful psychological journey into the inner life of Jim, an adolescent in the midst of trying to forge his own identity. Trapped in two different worlds, he belongs nowhere: at one end his Polish immigrant Detroit inner-city Catholic family and its Eastern European peasant beliefs and terrors; and at the other a late-1950s upper-class suburban Jesuit college-prep high school in suburban Detroit where he is totally unprepared to deal with the world of money and arrogance he finds there. At home, a severely restricted life style laced with raw gut emotion; at school emotionless intellect taught by arrogant Jesuit priests. On home turf he is a member of The Royal Lancers, a street gang where his life is threatened by Donny, a psychotically deranged fellow gang member. At school, because of his dress, especially his Ford Motor Company issue black work shoes, he is perceived as a non-entity, a non-being who has little or no worthwhile existence. Confronted with the death of young friend and then later an incident of racism and a savage incident of anti-Semitism, Jim rises to find the strength that forms the first layer of his conscience and his conscious sense of self. "The author is especially talented at depicting the paradoxical mix of frustration and exhilaration that marks adolescence. A thoughtful, meditative tale about the pain of youthful disillusionment." - Kirkus Reviews