Multi-Award Winning Author of the
Leaving Home Trilogy
Plus his most recent novel
A Reincarnational Romance
Second Life: Because the First One is Not Yet Finished
Leaving Home Trilogy
The words “leaving home” are central to my Leaving Home Trilogy. Leaving Home is most often understood as leaving a place of residence, more commonly known as your home. But in the Leaving Home Trilogy they take on a very different meaning.
Every child grows up in the emotional home of their early years, and every child’s initial response to life is based on the emotional condition of that first home. An obvious example would be growing up in a home of violence leaving the impression of a violent world the child has come to expect and needs to protect itself from.
As the early expectations are experienced internally over and over they become habit. And as habit they recede into the unconscious mind from where they dictate many of the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of a person’s ongoing life. On the other hand, if the home is one of care and support and respect for who the child is, the child grows up into a world he or she can trust and thrive in.
For any person to leave home no matter their age and no matter their early conditions, it is precisely the world of the unconscious impressions and judgments that every person unavoidably takes with them into their later life.
The Leaving Home Trilogy is a three-book fictional series about how the lead character, Jim, struggles to free himself from the grip of his own unconscious restraints and the discoveries he and the reader make along the way.
Worship of Hollow Gods ~
Leaving Home Trilogy Book 1
In Worship of a 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 appearance—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 worship without knowing it.
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.
Available on Amazon in
Audio, Kindle, & Paperback
An Ambition to Belong ~
Leaving Home Trilogy Book 2
An Ambition to Belong, the second book of the Leaving Home Trilogy, is an astute and insightful psychological journey into the inner life of Jim, an adolescent who is trying to forge his own identity.
Trapped in two different worlds, he belongs nowhere. At one end, his Polish immigrant 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 that world of money and arrogance he finds there. At home, raw gut emotion; at school emotionless intellect. At home 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 existence.
Confronted with 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.
Available on Amazon in
Audio, Kindle, & Paperback
When Angels Die ~
Leaving Home Trilogy Book 3
When Angels Die, the third book in James Sniechowski’s Leaving Home Trilogy, takes his lead character, Jim, from a prestigious New York City acting school to early success in his career. With each new role, his Polish peasant Catholic upbringing threatens to unravel his soul. An existential rivalry ensues with one part pulling him toward the world and a life of deep self-expression and another part demanding abject submission to a culture that views the world as treacherous, seductive, repulsive, and sinful.
While working at a regional theater, he finds real love for the first time, and it is through love that Jim discovers his true path.
When Angels Die, with its philosophic and poetic overtones, is storytelling at its very best.
Available on Amazon
in Audio, Kindle,& Paperback
