Journey with Jim through An Ambition to Belong, the 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)