“No Love Lost,” the next best-selling novel to hit the bookstores.The author, J. W. Smith, captures the street life of a young man withsimilarities resembling his own life, beginning with the early childhoodof Lil Jay and on into his manhood.Finally Smith brings the gut-wrenching truth of rigid living in a ghastly neighborhood and a twist of enlightenment to urban literature.Lil Jay is a young man growing up in the urban lifestyle of “gang life” inthe early 1990s and late 1980s. The streets of Los Angeles, California, tookpower over his mind at a young age, yet he still manages to prevail from theuncertainty of life that only his hood could offer. With a drunken cracked-outtrick for a father and a mother ready to thrash anyone who crosses her path, atroubled home life left him with very minimal options for his future. As a result,Lil Jay only had the streets to call home and the hood as his family. Crossingpaths with sex and women, death and murderers, drug dealers and junkies,prostitutes and pimps, somewhere along the way he finds his true path. Thesister of his mentor, Charlette, a high-class, well-educated woman, intrigueshis inner thoughts. Finding himself with a long-term prison sentence, Jaynever anticipated what would be waiting for him on the outside. Perseverancetook control of his mind and bestowed upon him a different light, allowing himto flourish into a new man in God’s glory.