The Butterfly Tree

From multi-national award-winning newspaper columnist Woody Woodburn comes a magical heartstring-pulling, heart-racing, debut novel about family ties that bind us across time.


The Butterfly Tree: An Extraordinary Saga of Seven Generations is about family ties that bind us across time-and the universal quest to rise to a higher purpose and then lift the next generation upon our shoulders. It is about deep roots and strong branches, literally and figuratively, and about a single "family" tree being grafted from three disparate-and multiracial-lineages, and made more majestic because of these unions.


This page-turning tale, told in short fast-paced chapters, takes readers on a sweeping adventure aboard the Mayflower and the Underground Railroad; under The Big Top of an 1860s American circus and inside a small high school athletic shed secretly inhabited by a homeless teenager in the 1980s; from the battlefields of the Civil War to the jungles of Vietnam; from 1620 to 2020.


The seven generations in these pages are not all related by bloodline, but are bound together by love and friendship-and by a kitchen table that was borne from The Butterfly Tree. Each protagonist overcomes personal adversity before rising to help another, and in doing so a single "family" tree is grafted from three disparate-and multiracial-lineages, and made more majestic because of these unions.