An Ambition To Belong


Young Adult - Coming of Age
232 Pages
Reviewed on 07/22/2018
Buy on Amazon

This author participates in the Readers' Favorite Free Book Program, which is open to all readers and is completely free. The author will provide you with a free copy of their book in exchange for an honest review. You and the author will discuss what sites you will post your review to and what kind of copy of the book you would like to receive (eBook, PDF, Word, paperback, etc.). To begin, click the purple email icon to send this author a private email.

This author participates in the Readers' Favorite Book Review Exchange Program, which is open to all authors and is completely free. Simply put, you agree to provide an honest review an author's book in exchange for the author doing the same for you. What sites your reviews are posted on (B&N, Amazon, etc.) and whether you send digital (eBook, PDF, Word, etc.) or hard copies of your books to each other for review is up to you. To begin, click the purple email icon to send this author a private email, and be sure to describe your book or include a link to your Readers' Favorite review page or Amazon page.

This author participates in the Readers' Favorite Book Donation Program, which was created to help nonprofit and charitable organizations (schools, libraries, convalescent homes, soldier donation programs, etc.) by providing them with free books and to help authors garner more exposure for their work. This author is willing to donate free copies of their book in exchange for reviews (if circumstances allow) and the knowledge that their book is being read and enjoyed. To begin, click the purple email icon to send this author a private email. Be sure to tell the author who you are, what organization you are with, how many books you need, how they will be used, and the number of reviews, if any, you would be able to provide.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Viga Boland for Readers' Favorite

If you read, as I did, James Sniechowski’s book Worship of Hollow Gods and liked it, you will enjoy picking up An Ambition to Belong, where the author takes us inside the next key phase in his life: becoming a teen and moving on to high school. Jimush, as his mother calls him, is still very much the loner seeking some kind of recognition of his worth, along with an identity beyond his Polish “village community” where the Catholic religion and its prescription for staying out of hell rule most behaviour. With An Ambition to Belong to more than what his father and family embrace, he makes a feeble attempt at joining a gang. But he soon realizes that he is essentially a timid good kid whose battles with the dictates of his Catholic upbringing and his own conscience make him unsuited to gang membership.

He has no better luck trying to fit into his new high school, Catholic of course. The more preaching he hears, the more he tunes out. In fact, he finds it’s far more interesting to watch the rich kids nearby who drive Corvettes and wear high end clothes and shoes, none of which he can afford. He pictures maids cleaning their homes and instantly draws comparisons to his hard-working mom who does all the cooking and cleaning in their own home, accepting her fate as a poor immigrant housewife with a hard-working and sometimes simply hard husband. Like Jimush, she has unfulfilled hopes and dreams of being someone more than she is.

And as James Sniechowski did in his first book of this memoir trilogy, he tells much of this story through his protagonist’s mind, using dialogue only as needed, and building ever so slowly to a rather climactic finish. If readers are happy with such introspective memoirs and don’t look for lots of action, they will enjoy this coming of age memoir, with its raw and honest emotion, its insights into what makes people tick, its reminders of the music and times in 1950s Detroit, and especially the realizations that Jimush makes at the end about the ridiculous prejudices that keep races and cultures apart, killing understanding and communication and fostering intolerance.