A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

Institute History

Description

Orlandito “Dito” Montiel, son of Orlando, a Nicaraguan immigrant, and an Irish mother, grew up wild in the streets of Astoria, Queens. It’s the 1980’s. Diane Honeyman’s in hot pink leg warmers, Puerto Ricans are listening to Journey (they really did!), and innocent Giuseppes and Antonios set the stage. Kids from nowhere, going nowhere. At 14, Dito watches as his best friend and surrogate older brother, Antonio, beat another kid to death with a baseball bat in a fight. The thin line between leaving and abandoning his family, friends, and the neighborhood torments him in his journey to give voice to his pain and subsequent redemption.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints tells the quintessentially American story of a young man’s hunger for experience, his dawning awareness of the bigger world across the bridge, and of the loyalties that bind him to a violent past and to the flawed and desperate saints that have guided him.

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