Book excerpt: The Tree of Lost Dreams takes Johnny DaSilva and his Big Tree buddies from youths who lived out their fantasies of heroism high on the towering limbs of the Big Tree to the real world. While trying and failing to enter WW II because of their youth, they were greeted with the Korean War. Johnny's words "Now we have our own war" were received with some standing tall on their high limb while others deciding to instead abandon the heights and place their two feet squarely on the ground. Johnny, Righty, Scoff, Rhesus and others bought into Johnny's words, "If we don't fight them there, we will fight them here." The two young girls that were in love with Johnny, wealthy and popular Yelena, and poor and abused Bernadette, are now women. It took little time for the Big Tree gang to learn the great distance between the lofty fresh air of their beloved Tree to the lowly face in the muck, nearly impossible to breathe gasps of battlefield blood and barf. Johnny suffers the epitome of the wounds of the lower depths and the different directions it spirals him, Yelena and Bernadette into. Hopefully you have read the Tree of Young Dreamers, Frank Sousa's first novel of the Tree Trilogy. The third, the Tree of New Roots is underway.