Anastasia Soare came to the U.S from Romania, “from nothing, nothing.”  She arrived with her family in Los Angeles with no money or English.  She was a Mill Girl, working fourteen-hour days in a beauty salon – clip, clip, clip, spray, chat.  But at some point her soul kicked in, and she realized that this would be her forever life…. unless she figured a way out.  She looked around and listened hard, and what she saw and heard was…. Beverly Hills.  It’s where the money was.  “… I needed to do something… I needed to prove and to find out who I was as a person, what I was worth….I thought ‘This is not why I came to this country.  This is the land of opportunity.  I have to do this, otherwise why did I come here?  To have a worse life than I had in Romania?  No.”  The business that she founded – beauty care, eyebrow-shaping, yes, eyebrow-shaping – grew into an empire with over 1600 international and US outlets and salons.  Along the way she created a charitable foundation to help get smart and lucky kids out of the foster care system into beauty and skincare training and jobs, fostering the same self-sufficiency this Mill Girl worked so hard for.  

Every one of Byrne’s Heroes emerged from seemingly impossible, stuck circumstances – Lizzy Murray, born to drug-addicted parents, was homeless, but made her way to Harvard; G. M. Rao grew up in a village in India with no electricity or phones, but when on to create an empire that includes power plants and development; Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko’s, like Charles Schwab and the Mill girl, is a dyslexic who struggled to conquer reading, but developed survival skills such as super sharp observation skills that showed him his dream.  

Through each Hero Story the author illuminates the journey - the base beginnings and injured life, the vision appears, the beginnings of the quest – the challenges, failures, detours and losses, and finally the victories and rewards.  Hero is designed for ordinary people like us to see and think through the very same journey to, if we are as The Mill Girl says CrazyLucky, drag us over the finish line – maybe a bit bruised and torn -  into an empowered  and enlightened life.   

The Mill Girl Verdict – 90% inspiration, 10% too short.