The Tree of Lost Dreams

About the Book

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.

About the Author

Frank Sousa was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Married to his high school sweetheart, they live in a small Western Massachusetts town. His large family is everything to him and also includes English setters Chumley and Elmer and every stray, dropped-off waif on their country road. His college creative writing professor was Ted Hughes of The Hawk in the Rain, later poet laureate of Great Britain. Sylvia Plath of The Bell Jar was his great promoter in encouraging Frank, believing his writing was “wonderful,” although she confessed she did not understand it as he “wrote in American.”