Book excerpt: Robert O’Brien was born in the late ’60s in Pasadena, Texas. Growing up as a boy in the ’70s before the age of video games, VCRs and cable television, Robert and his friends used their vivid imaginations to create a fantasy world around their real-life events. We Were Boys is the retelling of these events, cast in the fantasy in which they were first imagined. Hilariously funny, and retold in great detail, we follow Robert and his friends as they parachute into enemy territory, travel down the Amazon River and make the first landing on Mars. The stories and antics of Robert and his friends remind us that imagination is how dreams begin, And that without imagination we might have never taken the journeys that expanded our minds and hearts.