I would like to thank Joe Meno for writing this book and myself for dedicating hours of my life to rummaging through secondhand bookstores on a quest to find books the almighty algorithm would have never suggested to me. Chicago's southside, 2008: Aleks, Isobel and Daniel, the children of an immigrant family from Eastern Europe, are struggling to make ends meet. All of them are extraordinarily gifted - Aleks is a musical genius, Isobel got accepted into MIT at seventeen, Daniel spends his days buried in library books, seemingly studying nonstop. And yet, the financial struggles of their family, the lack of social security, their troubled history and their neighborhood of lost souls (their words, not mine) are placing more obstacles in their way than they have the strength to overcome. In fast-moving, sober and yet literary prose Joe Meno tells a story so tragic it makes you want to do nothing but curl up and contemplate the appalling injustice of the capitalist hellscape we all live in. I would love to force-feed this book to any *eNtRePrEnEuR* who tells people that all you have to do to succeed is work hard. The "Book of Extraordinary Tragedies" lets you meet wonderful, dedicated, intelligent people who want nothing but to be good and do their part - in a system that was designed to make them fail. If this hasn’t become blatantly clear by now: I loved this book more than I ever would have thought. Get your hands on it, read it, learn from it, and then recommend it to all your friends. We need it.