Book Review: Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

My Rating:

4.5⭐

Our protagonist, seventeen-year-old East Oakland resident Kiara Johnson is struggling to make ends meet and keep it together for herself and her older brother Marcus who is unable to hold a job and would rather spend time (unsuccessfully) pursuing a career in music. Their father passed away when she was thirteen and her mother is currently a resident of a halfway house for reasons that are gradually revealed. Kiara also feels responsible for the well-being of nine-year-year-old Trevor her neighbor Dee’s son who is often abandoned by his mother and left to fend for himself. Kia genuinely cares for Trevor and her time spent with him is one of the few bright spots in her unhappy life. When her landlord doubles her rent and she is unsuccessful in securing gainful employment elsewhere, an unfortunate turn of events sees her take to prostitution in a last-ditch effort to avoid eviction and starvation. 

She tells herself that this is temporary and once Marcus gets a job or alternative avenues of income open up for her, she will stop. She still hopes for a better day when her brother would step up and take his responsibilities seriously and she would be free to choose the direction of her life. 

 "Most days I say I don’t believe in nothing, except something about the way the night colors everything makes me want to. Not in an afterlife, heaven, or any of that shit. That just makes us feel better about dying and I don’t really got nothing to fear about dying in the first place. I just think that the stars might line up and trail into an otherworld. Doesn’t have to be a better world because that probably doesn’t exist, but I think it is something else. Somewhere where the people walk a little different. Maybe they speak in hums. Maybe they all got the same face or maybe they don’t have faces at all. When I have enough time to stare at the sky, I imagine I might be lucky enough to catch glimpses of the something. Always get pulled back to this planet, though." 

Kiara’s misfortune continues when she is picked up by the police. But instead of arresting her, the local officers take advantage of her situation. She soon finds herself in the middle of a shocking scandal that garners national attention. As she prepares to testify as a key witness, her life once again is thrown into chaos. While she faces threats from those who would do everything in their power to keep their abhorrent acts from being revealed in the open, she also finds support from her friends and allies who try to help her through it all. 

 The author had drawn inspiration for her story from the real-life Oakland PD scandal of 2015. In her notes, Leila Mottley writes, “When I began writing Nightcrawling, I was seventeen and contemplating what it meant to be vulnerable, unprotected, and unseen”. At the end of the day, Kiara is herself a child, forced to assume the mantle of an adult, trying to navigate her way through a world that has not been kind to her and with no respite in clear view. The depictions of social injustice, sexual abuse and exploitation are immensely disturbing and I am not surprised that many have put this one aside midway. Kiara’s journey is a painful one, but she is a survivor and we keep rooting for her. The author’s writing is powerful and almost poetic in its delivery. Compelling, timely and relevant, Leila Mottley’s Nightcrawling is a brilliant debut. I am eager to read more from this talented new author in the future.