Romance! Cultural barriers! Career challenges! And success!
All that in When Angels Die, third book in James Sniechowski’s Leaving Home Trilogy. His lead character, Jim, finds himself going from a prestigious New York City acting school to early success in a regional theater in St Louis. With each new role, and rave reviews from professional theater reviewers, the remnants of his Polish peasant Catholic upbringing threaten to unravel his career and his soul.
A deeply personal rivalry ensues
one part pulling him toward the world of success and a life of deeply satisfying self-expression and the other demanding abject submission to a culture that views the world as treacherous, seductive, and sinful.
Meanwhile, Jim is blessed by the grace and wisdom of the older Southern-born woman who is all too pleased to have young Jim as her tenant. At the same time, he discovers real love for the first time with a young, intelligent woman who accepts him for all that he is. And it is through the challenges evoked by love from these two women that Jim discovers the depth of his true identity and eventual release from his early roots. When Angels Die, with its philosophic and poetic overtones, is storytelling at its very 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.
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.
"...This is the first installment in the author's Leaving Home Trilogy, and it's a beautifully impressionistic novel that he describes as "autobiographical fiction." The prose is powerfully evocative, ably capturing the bewildered isolation Jim experiences in his own home: "At nine years old, I could feel that barrenness, the draining effect of mechanical living; feel but not make sense of; feel in my body like a worm screwing itself into my every day. A poignant and poetic depiction of a tumultuous childhood." ~Kirkus Reviews
