An Ambition to Belong
, 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.