My Path to Greatness (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9798991624503)

If young Johan Manootdjian has any complaint to make to God, could the deity not have endowed him with a stronger body and a more agile mind? As for his family, Johan has only love for his devoutly religious mother, but must she remind him that they are living in the last days and Jesus will come as a thief in the night? Has she not had her life and could she not allow him now to have his? And what is he to make of her fervent wish that the family all be in heaven together when they are not together here on earth? Are his considerably older sisters not quick to use their hands and sharp with their tongues? And what is he to do but fear his volatile and remote father and his threats if made to get up? Has Johan not witnessed what his father does do when made to get up?

Unsupervised, Johan roams the streets of New York City in the 1950s and through the first half of the next decade, where he witnesses outbreaks of far more terrifying violence. He would like to be good, a true sunbeam for Jesus, and make up for the sorrow his floundering older siblings cause his mother, but sunbeam status seems to elude him. He steals from her pocketbook and there is his chronic shoplifting and pattern of incorrigible behavior at the grade school he attends, leading to expulsion.

But now Johan has been given a second chance. At his new school, he is quieter, more studious. True, imprisoning shame about his home life severely limits his ability to engage socially with his classmates from wealthy families, but academically he feels he is on the path to success. Unlike his older siblings, he will not be crippled by dependency and languish in the single room occupancy his mother and aunt manage. Though only modestly athletic, he envisions himself as the second coming of Bill Bradley, All-American basketball star at Princeton University. But a seemingly impassable barrier has been placed in his path. The SAT cannot be prepared for, his ninth grade teacher flatly declares; either one has the innate ability to do well or not. And how is he to attend whatever college will have him and still fit Jane, a girl he has grown obsessively and tormentedly enmeshed with, into his future? These are but a few of the threats seeking to divert Johan from his path to greatness.

A novel ins three parts, Part One is a first person narrative by Johan, starting in early childhood. In Part Two continues the first person narrative, Johan is at a new private school after his expulsion in sixth grade from his previous school for incorrigible behavior: Part Three encompasses his high school years.