Review of The Former Hero by Jeffery Allen Mays

You can pick up the book here on Amazon:

Rating: 7.5/10

Value: Around $4.00 for kindle and $15.00 for paperback

Readers: I would recommend this book to those who have a higher reading level.  To get the most out of the book you would need a 12th grade reading level.  The genre is a mix between crime drama and psychological drama.

Summary:  The book starts with a drug addicted mother frantically searching for her missing child.  This is where the author shines light on the interesting environment he has created.  The city is one filled completely with corruption.  The mother can’t call the police because they have been bought by a rich man who bought his way into being mayor.  The only way she knows to help herself is to find the child herself.  As the story develops the author brings in more characters and focuses on developing people into black and white heroes and villains.  There is a huge amount of story within these pages.  Each character both good and bad the author will spend time with.  He develops them all quite well, but with all this it is difficult to keep a grasp on the world being developed.

Positive:  There are two points that I felt were done very well in this book.  The first is the world Mays creates.  This is a world that is completely different from what the majority of us have experienced.  It was difficult for me to understand a world that could be bought and sold.  I have read about this type of corruption in history books, but to read a novel which has it developed so completely was extremely enjoyable.  It felt as though I was living in a different time with completely different circumstances.  The second factor of the book I enjoyed is different types of writing.  Each time the author jumps from character to character the style of writing changes completely.  There are even changes from prose to poetry which in a novel is extremely rare, but Mays pulls it off very well.

Negative: The book was well done and I enjoyed it, but found some down sides while reading.  The number one problem I had was the grammar and spelling errors in writing.  These were simple mistakes and I was able to immediately fix the error in my mind, but the frequency of errors were a bit disconcerting.  The other problem I had was the length of the book.  This is a very large book and though it has excellent action in places there are many pages which feel like they drag while nothing of importance is happening.  Mays will develop aspects of character, environment, or plot that really don’t play enough into the story to need such description.
 
Characters:  The characters within the book were definitely the strong point of the book.  I found the theories of heroism and villainy were outstanding.  The world created fitted the extremism of the analogies for good and bad.  You are able to see the true good and evil in the writing with the constant battle between both.  By the end Mays wraps the whole thing up nicely leaving the reader understanding the entirety of the book.
Writing:  Though Mays is a very good writer like I said previously the book was not edited well.  Looking past these mistakes is difficult, but if you are able to do so the writing is smooth.  The descriptions are done in a way that places the reader in the environment Mays creates.