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| Categories | Genre Fiction |
| Author | Leila Mottley |
| Publisher | Random House Large Print; Large type / Large print edition (June 28, 2022) |
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 400 pages |
| Item Weight | 14.4 ounces |
| Dimensions |
6.03 x 1.07 x 9.19 inches |
I. Book introduction
BOOKER PRIZE LONG-LIST • NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK • A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system. This debut of a blazingly original voice “bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole” (Tommy Orange, author of There There).
Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison
But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent—which has more than doubled—and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed. One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.
Rich with raw beauty, electrifying intensity, and piercing vulnerability, Nightcrawling marks the stunning arrival of a voice unlike any we have heard before.
Editorial Reviews
“A soul-searching portrait of survival and hope.” —Oprah Winfrey
“Astonishing . . . Nightcrawling heralds a bold new voice in fiction.” —Associated Press
“Mottley writes with a lyrical abandon.” —New York Times Book Review
“Nightcrawling really is a powerful, poignant story worth your attention . . . Revelatory . . . My god—that voice. It’s sometimes too painful to keep reading, but always too urgent to stop.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post
“Nightcrawling bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole.” —Tommy Orange, author of There There
“Unflinching . . . Essential to understanding how maddeningly elusive justice can be.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Nightcrawling is a scorching, incredibly readable book . . . Get ready. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter. Leila Mottley is here.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
“Nightcrawling marks the dazzling arrival of a young writer with a voice and vision you won’t easily get out of your head . . . When asked how to write in a world dominated by a white culture, Toni Morrison once responded: ‘By trying to alter language, simply to free it up, not to repress or confine it . . . Tease it. Blast its racist straitjacket.’ At a time when structural imbalances of capital, heath, gender, and race deepen divides, the young American Leila Mottley’s debut novel is a searing testament to the liberated spirit and explosive ingenuity of such storytelling.” —The Guardian
“Mottley accesses the feelings one sometimes has while reading Dickens, the breathless sense that some massive unfairness is being inflicted on a good and innocent person . . . Kiara’s true outlet for hope is in the makeshift family of friends and relatives she manages to hold together. From such connections Mottley’s seemingly fatalistic book finds its buoyant humanity.” —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“Leila Mottley’s commanding debut, inspired by the life events of one woman’s struggle for body and soul against crushing exploitation, is fierce and devastating, rendered with electrifying urgency by this colossal young talent.” —Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
“Mottley’s writing is electric and stylish, which makes her subject matter especially chilling.” —Teen Vogue
“Kiara’s voice—simultaneously childlike, lyrical, and fierce—is the most unforgettable element of Nightcrawling.” —Mother Jones
“Fast money, crooked cops, and dire consequences are at the forefront of Mottley’s electric debut novel . . . A shocking page-turner.” —Elle
“With its powerful poetry and courageous, unsparing vision, Nightcrawling is more than just a magnificent debut novel. It is a bid, by this prodigiously gifted young writer, to heal a broken world.” —Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness
“Leila Mottley has an extraordinary gift. She writes with the humility and sparkle of a child, but with the skill and deft touch of a wizened, seasoned storyteller.” —James McBride, author of Deacon King Kong
“Electric . . . Not to be missed.” —Shondaland
“So compelling that one cannot put it down . . . Through Kiara, Mottley gives voice to countless Black women and girls who remain invisible, vulnerable, and dehumanized by a system that deems them disposable . . . We need Kiara’s story, but more importantly, we need young writers like Leila Mottley . . . A testimony to hope, resilience, and love.” —Liber: A Feminist Review
“Leila Mottley is a name to pay attention to . . . Nightcrawling will make you desperate, it will make you awed, it will make you read anything that Mottley should ever choose to write.” —CrimeReads
“Leila Mottley has a poet’s delicate touch when she tells us the most brutal, heart-crushing truths. This is an electrifying debut.” —Dave Eggers, author of The Every
“A remarkable debut novel . . . Incendiary . . . The captivating, distinctively voiced Kiara is a young black American who can shoot hoops and skateboard, but her literary antecedents are Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Victor Hugo’s Fantine, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth.” —The Sunday Times (U.K.)
“This is an accomplished first novel with a remarkable heroine whom the reader wills on every step of the way . . . Both a searing depiction of sexual exploitation and a gripping account of a struggle for survival . . . Hard-hitting but never heavy-handed.” —The Economist
“Unflinching, poetic, and deeply resonant, this stunning debut from Oakland teen Leila Mottley marks the arrival of an extraordinary new voice.” —Woman’s Own (U.K.)
“Feels vital in this cultural moment . . . Fires on all cylinders.” —Sydney Morning Herald
“Stunning . . . Kiara is an unforgettable dynamo, and her story brings critical human depth to conversations about police sexual violence.” —Booklist (starred)
“A work of devastating social realism . . . executed with relentless momentum . . . A powerful discourse on the dehumanizing effects policing can have on marginalized communities, bodies, and minds (and especially on Black women).” —Library Journal(starred)
“Bold and beautiful . . . This heartrending story makes for a powerful testament to a Black woman’s resilience.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Lush, immersive.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Moved me to tears . . . Mottley is a master at describing scenes.” —iNews
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of June 2022: An unflinching, mesmerizing, and bruising novel, Nightcrawling tackles the injustices of poverty, racism, sexism, and policing with such poetic clarity that it’s impossible to put down. And while Leila Mottley isn’t afraid to shine a light on the dark forces that plague the streets of Oakland, it’s also a love letter to the city. In East Oakland, Kiara, a Black high school drop-out, is barely scraping by. Her mother is in jail, her dad is gone, her older brother is consumed with pursuing a non-existent rapping career, and she’s also taken an abandoned nine-year-old boy under her wing. During a night out on the town, she unknowingly steps into a world of prostitution—nightcrawling—and is forced into a far more sinister and abusive scheme by the very people who could arrest her for it. There is desperation in Kiara’s motivations and it’s her desire to protect the people she loves that catapults this story and makes it one of the most notable debuts of the year. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor —
About Leila Mottley
Leila Mottley (born 2002) is an American novelist and poet. She is the The New York Times bestselling author of Nightcrawling, an Oprah’s Book Club pick.
Mottley was born and raised in Oakland, California, where she continues to live. She attended Smith College and was mentored by her writing professor author Ruth Ozeki who helped her navigate a bidding war for her debut novel Nightcrawling.
Mottley was named the Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, California in 2018 at age 16, having served the prior year as Vice Youth Poet Laureate. Her poetry has appeared in The New York Times.
Mottley co-wrote and starred in a documentary short, When I Write It, an official selection of the Tribeca Film Festival in 2020.
In June 2022, Mottley published her first novel, Nightcrawling. She is the youngest author ever selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Nightcrawling was longlisted for the Booker Prize on July 26, 2022. Mottley was the youngest author ever to be longlisted.
II. [Reviews] Nightcrawling: A novel by Leila Mottley
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1. ELYSE WALTERS review Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
I chose to read “Nightcrawling”, a debut by Leila Mottley, because I lived in Oakland as a little girl in a tough neighborhood.
I spent several years living off High Street (in our cockroach gray house)….
near the funeral homes …
My father, grandparents, and other relatives are all buried in the Jewish funeral home in Oakland.
There are many sides to Oakland.
Bad rap Oakland -and great city Oakland.
Leila Mottley, shows us the ugly side of ‘Bad Rap’ Oakland.
…..the crime, the ghetto neighborhoods, the poverty, and the struggles to survive to stay alive.
When I lived near High Street, I remember walking door to door – [at age 5] – alone – selling camp fire mints …
‘needing’ to sell the ‘most’ chocolate mints in my campfire (Bluebirds) troupe because only one girl got to go to overnight camp ‘free’.
If I didn’t win that contest, I wouldn’t have been able to attend.
My mother had a low paying job at Montgomery Wards, and was financially struggling after my dad died. She was also grieving.
I spent hours a day each weekend walking door-to-door selling those mints along High Street … a very unsafe thing to do for a five year old girl.
I won that contest, and went to overnight camp.
Today — I hate knowing that Oakland still gets a ‘Bad Rap’ reputation— because many of us know it’s a beautiful city!!
However,
it was important that I visit this story — I had already known much of the horrid history – history that must not be forgotten – and crimes that should never be allowed to go unpunished.
I was pulling for greatness for this 17-year-old author even before I started reading her book. I didn’t need to—
as Mottley held her own – with no help from me.
I’m so inspired by her. She wrote a story that needed to be told…
Her writing had emotional fire— one that felt like cockroaches were crawling all over my skin.
Clearly, this is not a sunny-rosey-posey novel….
but it’s passionately written -powerfully affecting- spirited with purpose!
“Downtown Oakland has a whole lot of bars clubs, and holes where people find themselves wasted and dancing at 2 am in the morning”.
“There’s a strip club tucked underneath a yoga studio on the corner, its metal door painted a sparkling black. I can hear the faint sounds of music and even though it’s only five or so in the evening, they’ve got the door propped open. I walk into a room dimly lit by those lightbulbs that look sort of light candles, and a few lone people are propped on the stools or sitting at the circular tables, lurking in the darkest patches of the place, the poles looming large in the center, one woman aerial and another bored”.
Kiara didn’t have a resume, and she didn’t know if she wanted a job stripping… but she was desperate. She used to think the only thing one got from turning eighteen (she was still only seventeen the day she walked into that bar)….was the right to vote.
Ha…. apparently there were other benefits.
For real….
In 2005, a major scandal broke out in the news involving a teenager- a sex worker at the time- in Oakland who was sexually exploited by more than a dozen police officers.
The officers were suspended but no criminal charges were brought against them.
This story tells of the heartbreaking and devastated violence done one young girl — inspired by one case that entered the media — but there were dozens of other cases of sex workers and young women who experience violence at the hands of police and did not have their stories told.
Leila Mottley —
—at age only seventeen— she knew what it felt like to be a young black girl, vulnerable, unprotected, and unseen. When she was growing up, she was often told she had to shield her brother, her dad, and all the black men around her —
—shield their safety, their bodies, and their dreams. But what she learned was that her own safety, body and dreams, was secondary.
In this novel, Kiara was a fictional character but she was a reflection of the types of violence that black and brown women faced regularly.
In 2010, a study found that police sexual violence was the second most reported instance of police misconduct and disproportionately impacts women of color.
With Leila Mottley’s piercing prose, I am reminded that
safety, justice, joy, and love is a birthright!!
2. SUJOYA review Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize!
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.
3. BARBARA review Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
I am stunned after listening to the audio of “Nightcrawling: A Novel” by Leila Mottley. If you enjoy a good audio, I cannot recommend this audio highly enough. Narrator Joniece Abbott-Pratt gives life to the narrator, Kiara, who tells us her story, in her own voice, as she struggles to survive on her own.
Leila Mottley began writing this story when she was 17 years old. In 2015 when she was a young teenager in Oakland, there was a 2015 court case in which the Oakland Police Department was accused of sexually exploiting a teenager and then covering it up. Mottley, in her author’s notes, states that Kiara is pure fiction, Kiara’s life is nonfiction. Mottley wanted to give voice to the girls, women, trans, boys who have been victims of violence, especially black and brown women. She states that a 2010 study found that police sexual violence is the 2nd most reported instance of police misconduct. As our world comes to terms with police brutality regarding men of color, the violence against women are neglected in the press. Mottley shows how it begins, how the victims have little or no choices. She used the research she had done on the 2015 court case along with numerous, lesser known, cases for this story. She has done such a fine job, that she is now the youngest author nominated for the Booker Prize award.
Why read/listen to this story? Well, Mottley deftly shows how a young, disenfranchised girl, who wants a good, clean life, can fall prey to violence. With no or minimal adult help, these girls are attempting to negotiate supporting themselves and doing right. Furthermore, Mottley is Oakland’s youth poet laureate, and her prose are outstanding. In a scene with her lawyer, Marsha, who is trying to get her reading for a court appearance, Kiara thinks, “Marsha done looked up ‘how to be your best self’ and found some Cosmo article about actualization.”
In fact, one of the best reasons to read/listen to the novel is that Mottley shows us how a sassy, cheeky young girl says things that are not in alignment with their thoughts. Kiara has a good head on her shoulders and thinks, plans, and strategizes how to earn money, and take care of family. But if an adult in authority asks her a question, her retorts do not reflect her intelligence. She’s learned that is the only way to survive, to be sassy.
I am a 65 year old white lady, and in listening to this story, I learned what it’s like to be a young black girl on the gritty streets of a major U.S. city. Mottley wisely told Kiara’s story with minimal graphic and horrific scenes. She didn’t need those scenes to get her message out. She allows the reader’s imagination to take themselves into that pit of hell.
This is a story of an epidemic that privileged people of our country rarely see. I highly recommend this illuminating story.
4. CHERI review Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
This story is set in Oakland, California, and while there are a few neighborhoods in Oakland that are what some might consider relatively well-off, Kiara Johnson doesn’t live in one of those neighborhoods. Kiara lives in a run-down Apartment building which is inappropriately named Regal-Hi Apartments, where the only thing high about it are some of the tenants. There is a pool, which is accessorized with used bags filled with dog poop floating on the surface. For Kiara, this is home, there is nowhere else to go.
Kiara’s family seems to be losing everything a little bit at a time, and a little bit at a time it diminishes her, taking the people she loves away. First, her father, who spent much of her young life in prison, died when she was just 13. Her mother was ‘sent away’ after another tragic event which followed not long after. She and her older brother Marcus are the only ones left in the apartment, neither one finished their education, and Marcus has dreams to be a star. They are broke, and rent is due. Kiara looks for jobs everywhere she can think of – but the local stores won’t hire her. She goes to the strip club hoping her brother’s ex-girlfriend who works as a bartender can give her a job, but at 17, she’s too young to work there. Her brother’s ex feels bad about not being able to help, so she offers her a drink. And then another, followed by two more. As she leaves, a man follows her out of the club, takes her to a place, and after he is done with her, he presses an unexpected roll of money into her hand and walks away.
It isn’t that she intended her life would turn out this way, but with her brother not able to have held onto a job and unwilling to find a new one because that would take away time from his time spent dreaming about making a career in the music industry, and a landlord threatening them with eviction, along with no money for food, Kia is glad to have the money. At least it is something. Temporarily.
There is a darkness in this story, softened by the beauty of the prose, but Kia is someone you will root for. Her life, at her young age with only vague memories of parental advice, has been filled with pain and an almost feral drive to survive which only increases as she is left with more responsibilities – including a nine-year-old whose mother leaves him with Kia, and then disappears. There is no one to turn to for help, and so she does what she believes she needs to, in order to endure.
This is a story of survival, of compassion despite the affliction of poverty and crushing injustices. An incredibly moving story shared through prose that mesmerizes. That Leila Mottley wrote this at the age of 17 is nothing less than astonishing.
Published: 07 Jun 2022
5. DEBBIE review Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
Wow, this is one dark novel, but its mesmerizing prose and captivating star of the show made it unputdownable for me. It gives you an up-close look at a (fictional) poor, black, 17-year-old girl in Oakland, California. Kiera, or Ki, as she is called, struggles to eat and pay rent, and she ends up a streetwalker—or here, called a nightcrawler (which is way more visual). The cops in this story are bad bad abusers, so be prepared to be sickened. Kiera is the one telling the story, which adds a layer of realness.
I meant it when I said this book is dark. Look at how the book opens:
“The swimming pool is filled with dog shit and Dee’s laughter mocks us at dawn.”
Now, this sentence might send some running for cover. There aren’t other scatological images, don’t worry, but the poop in the pool is mentioned numerous times. But way worse than that picture (unfortunately, imprinted in my mind—will I ever not see it?) are the many sexual abuse scenes, which are very hard to watch and which are also stuck in my head.
Really, I understand if people have to pass on this book, and it’s a good idea to do so if you have triggers. But for me, I appreciated getting a view of what life could be like for black people in a poverty-stricken city. It shook me up—and it made me furious at how oppressive the scene is and how corrupt police can be.
Kiera lives in a slum apartment and takes care of a 10-year-old boy because the mother has basically abandoned him. Kiera’s relationship with the boy is touching and heartbreaking. Kiera has a brother, who is a mess, but who loves Kiera so much he has a tattoo of her fingerprint on his neck. This is another image I’ll remember.
A funny aside: I felt pretty damn cool that I knew what a grill was. If you had asked me a couple of weeks ago, I would have said, “George Foreman” as fast as could be. But the other day I watched To Tell the Truth (yep, a true confession about one of my “bad TV” addictions; hangs head in embarrassment). On the show, a panel has to guess which person out of three is telling the truth about having a certain occupation. In this case, the panel had to figure out which of the three people was the real “grill maker.” I was completely confused when the questions from the panel were about teeth instead of about cooking hamburgers in the backyard. So I Googled “grill” and discovered that a grill is also a set of gold teeth that some hip-hoppers wear. Ah ha! I’ve seen gold teeth but I didn’t know anything about them, like that there were qualified people who made grills to fit over your teeth. So fast forward, I came across” grill” in this book and patted myself on the back for knowing we weren’t talking George Foreman here:
“His cheeks dip into his face and I know he’s sucking them in, making them touch his grill.”
Had I not seen To Tell the Truth, I would have been trying to figure out how he got his cheeks to touch his backyard grill. See? Bad TV can be very educational.
But seriously, this book is amazing. It’s impossible not to care deeply about Kiera and not to be wowed by the language. Every single sentence is rich and it’s easy to pay attention to them. They flow, oh so smoothly—they aren’t too abstract and I didn’t have to read them more than once. My only complaint is that the sentence structure and vocabulary are often way too sophisticated for Kiera. I did a “nevermind,” because the story was just too good for me to worry about it.
I know the book is fiction, but it has a link to real life in that the author (who is only 19; she wrote the book when she was 17!) grew up in Oakland and she knows the scene. The story is based on a 2015 case of a cop who committed suicide.
This is Mottley’s debut novel. It blows my mind that she can already write with such passion and compassion, and with prose to die for. And her characters’ hearts and souls just ooze off the pages.
Those who want a gritty story and can stomach the darkness, look no further. Prose is gorgeous, plot is ungodly dreary. The prose wins.
I have my eye on this author. She’s so young, she has the whole world ahead of her to write more gems like this one. Can’t wait!
Thanks to Edelweiss for the advance copy.
6. CEECEE review Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
4.5 rounded up
Oakland, Ca. Seventeen year old jobless Kiara (Kia) Johnson lives with her brother at the Regal-Hi. It sounds glamorous but its so far from that in its squalid, run down, high rent grubbiness. She lives with her brother Marcus who has delusions of making it big as a rapper which means no money is coming at all. She’s worried, she’s frustrated, she has to get a job but she has no resume so she’s trapped. She does what she has to do in order to survive, in other words, nightcrawling. The inevitable vulnerability leads to her becoming ensnared by those more powerful than herself. This is based on a true story of a major scandal of sexual exploitation by members of the Oakland PD, though the character of Kiara is entirely fictional.
This novel stuns you in several ways. First of all, the way it’s written is amazing as the quality of the prose is outstanding. The author makes you feel what Kia feels and I can hear her voice via the dialogue. She’s a survivor with a heart of gold. Secondly, you are stunned by the horrifying and shocking abuse, how a human being is treated like trash and is powerless to do anything about it as the system is stacked against her. The injustice angers and sickens you. Thirdly, the author started writing this book when SHE WAS 17!!! What a phenomenal talent has just emerged, I’m in awe of her literary ability as it’s so accomplished.
This is a debut of raw honesty, it’s very powerful as not only does it demonstrate the grinding poverty and mouth to mouth existence that some people have to live day to day but it reveals the rotten underbelly and corruption of the justice system and how it’s manipulated by those who should know better. It’s obviously a very dark topic but it’s extremely moving, compelling and devastatingly heartbreaking. I really like the way it ends – there is some hope, I have my fingers crossed.
Overall, I can’t deny this is a tough read but it’s one I recommend for the sheer quality of the writing and with what it reveals.
With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Bloomsbury Publishing PLC for the much appreciated arc in return for an honest review.
7. RYAN review Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
In NIGHTCRAWLING, seventeen year-old Kiara is living with her brother in Oakland, after both dropped out of school and are about to be evicted from their apartment. Her brother hopes to be a famous rapper like their uncle in LA. To make money, Kiara turns to sex work and gets involved with a dangerous group of men.
This is one of the harder books to review. So much of the novel’s success feels tied to the age of the author. While I think it’s a tremendous achievement for a 17 year old to write such a lauded novel, at the same time, yet I don’t think it measures up to other more literary books. The book feels very much like a first novel with everything thrown in: a mother just out of prison, a dead father, a missing girl, a rapper uncle, an abandoned neighbor boy. In many ways, I think this novel was very successful which is why I rate it highly. The plot is compelling and moves along quickly with some interesting characters. The writing is quite good, though not without flaws. I thought some of the turns of phrase and metaphors were quite poetic. It did have the feeling of trying too hard at times. Where the book struggled for me was that it had a lot of different threads that weren’t tied up in a satisfying way. I don’t need a happy ending and I thought the main plot line had a very realistic ending. Some of the other characters seemed to appear and disappear without a real conclusion.
Clearly, the author is a good writer and could be a great one some day. I think this is an important book to read for intersectional issues and abuse of black and brown women. Avoid if you are sensitive to abuse.
8. CAREY CALVERT review Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
Nightcrawling is a poetic screed, a nightmare turned lullaby that will submerge you in the same feces filled swimming pool that sits like a monument – “… the way the chlorine and feces have become part of the air, the natural scent of the apartment.”
It is a testament to place and time.
“None of us have ever set foot in the pool for as long as I been here,” says 17-year-old Kiara, who along with her brother, Marcus, attempt to survive in Oakland. Abandoned by their mother, who attempted to kill herself after neglecting her infant daughter; the infant later found dead in that very pool. Their father died years earlier.
Repulsed? Heard this before? Well, keep reading.
Nightcrawling is a contemplation of what it means to be vulnerable, unprotected, and unseen, says the author, the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate, Leila Mottley, whose work has been featured in the New York Times and Oprah Daily. Nightcrawling is a 2022 Oprah’s Book Club pick and has also recently (announced July 26, 2022) been long-listed for the 2022 Booker Prize (the leading literary award in the English-speaking world), with 20-year Mottley, the youngest ever.
Each sentence is a poem that wafts, delays, and immerses you in the mind of the novel’s heroine, Kiara.
Nightcrawling exposes the trauma without becoming bogged down in it; at once, an element of hope amidst a seemingly endless string of roadblocks including family, long ago friends turned dizzying acquaintances, drugs, crime and prostitution.
It is the familiar animus of our time.
“Letting the streets have you is like planning your own funeral. Streets always find you in the daylight, when you least expect them to. Night crawling up to me when the sun’s out.”
Kiara has to pay the rent but no one, other than the occasional side job, will hire her. Her slightly older brother Marcus tries but is too caught up in his own ego and pride and more importantly, the abandonment he feels from not only his mother and father but his ostensibly well to do Uncle Ty, who lives in LA, and has had success in the rap game.
A game Marcus wants to give his all but his all is too little to ward off the lure of the street to which he inevitably succumbs.
To Kiara, “Street money’s still money,” and what begins as a misunderstanding grants Kiara a sense of power. A power over men through the use of what she feels is the only thing she has left.
“Only thing worse than a untamed man is a man on the edge of it.”
In 2015, when Mottley was a young teenager in Oakland, a story broke describing how members of the Oakland Police Department, and several other police departments in the Bay Area, had participated in the sexual exploitation of a young woman and attempted to cover it up – author’s note.
“I’m starting to think there is no such thing as a good cop, that the uniform erases the person inside it.”
But Nightcrawling is less about cops than it is about humanity and degradation; the will to survive. Here, cops are simply the sledgehammer that keeps hammering even when there are no more holes to fill.
“The swimming pool is filled with dog sh*t and Dee’s laughter mocks us at dawn.”
But it is in the darkness brought to light, the true impact of Nightcrawling “that art is the way we imprint ourselves onto the world so there is no way to erase us.”
9. READNLIFTWITHSHAR review Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
Nightcrawling. Where did I begin with the review- this was an amazing experience. A heavy one, nonetheless, but a great journey to go through.
“Nobody learns to walk when they got weights inside they bellies. I want you to walk toward the water, baby. I want you to swim.”
This quote made a ton of sense when I got to the ending. I’m wondering if this was foreshadowing to what would happen at the end. The significance of the pool, swimming, and learning to walk all makes sense. When I first began reading, I didn’t know what to expect but I quickly learned what the book title meant. Kiara is a 17 y/o high school drop out trying to survive the rugged streets of Oakland. Surviving was all she knew. She, “used what she got to get what she wanted” but it wasn’t for anything extravagant- she needed her assets to survive the day to day. I cringed when I thought of this young girl having to do these things. The author was so methodical with her word placement and descriptions of what life was like for Kiara. It was fluid and the words were like water. It was amazing storytelling. My heart broke for Kiara as she tried to care for herself and her neighbor Trevor. It seemed every adult in both of their lives failed them. The system failed them.
While this book was amazing in every sense of the word, it was HEAVY! It made me want to cry, to hug the characters, and shield them from their hardships. I absolutely felt every emotion. The ending was bittersweet and while I didn’t want it to end, I really needed the ending to tell me what happened to Kiara and Trevor. Heartbreaking story and definitely a good book to dissect and discuss!
10. TRISHA review Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
“Silence starves us”
Brutal but well told. This is a tough story full of trigger warnings and real life. Kiara, our MC, tells her story and almost seems to dare you to hold eye contact with her while she does. She is growing up hard, her mother and father gone, it’s just her and her brother Marcus. But she is still 17 and her brother is barely older than her and they are just barely keeping their apartment and food. A notice on the door lets them know rent is doubling and Kiara can already see – they can’t pay more, let alone that much more.
But Marcus has fame and glory in his mind and can’t do a minimum wage job. So it’s on Kiara to keep a roof over their head. Being 17, she’s struggling to find anywhere that will hire her. This is such a believable story. As each new low is reached, you can’t help but want to flinch and stop watching but Kiara’s story needs to be told, needs to be watched, and she needs eye contact. I’m glad I kept reading because the growth and turns at the end made the journey worth it.
A huge thank you to the author and publisher for providing an e-ARC via Netgalley. This does not affect my opinion regarding the book.
III. [Quote] Nightcrawling: A novel by Leila Mottley
The best book quotes from Nightcrawling: A novel by Leila Mottley
“Streets always find you in the daylight, when you least expect them to. Night crawling up to me when the sun’s out.”
“That was before I learned that life won’t give you reasons for none of it, that sometimes fathers disappear and little girls don’t make it to another birthday and mothers forget to be mothers.”
“Mama used to tell me that blood is everything, but I think we’re all out here unlearning that sentiment, scraping our knees and asking strangers to patch us back up.”
“School’s got as many potholes as the streets, always chipping, always leaving us to trip.”
“We’re always trying to own men we don’t got no control of.”
“Silence starves us, chile. Feed yoself.”
“art is the way we imprint ourselves onto the world so there is no way to erase us.”
“I think 190 might have a moon in place of his heart: waxing and waning, trying to decide if it is whole.”
“She is the bottom of the ocean, where all the magic hides beneath too many layers of dark and water and salt.”
“He’s here, sunshine probably blistering the back of his neck, staring at me, hoping for anything different than what I’ve always given him. He doesn’t deserve fractions and that’s all I got, all I’m willing to give.”
“We always showing people our hands like it’s proof we’re human.”
“am still waiting to be hit by some universe-halting love that will turn me inside out and remove all the rotting parts of me.”
“The sky takes each flurry and sends it right back with just a hint of music lingering in the echo, a belt from some invisible trombone, the lowest note on an organ drawn out. Sound after sound flooding from my body like war-zone fire on a cold day, Mama rubbing the tightness out of my jaw, melting the tears back into my skin, until there is no more noise and my chest is heaving, out of breath and raw and Mama is holding me and the cars have not stopped, have not slowed, all of it, all the time racing past us while we are stuck between the sky and asphalt that does not know our names and Mama will walk me to the bus stop and leave me there and we will not speak of what the freeway does to us when it is nighttime and we are ghosts. But Mama taught me how to swim and I can see underwater. I can see.”
“I am telling her how these streets open us up and remove the part of us most worth keeping: the child left in us.”
“The idea of drowning doesn’t bother me, though, since we’re made of water anyway. It’s kind of like your body overflowing with itself.”
Book excerpts: Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
The swimming pool is filled with dog shit and Dee’s laughter mocks us at dawn. I’ve been telling her all week that she’s looking like the crackhead she is, laughing at the same joke like it’s gonna change. Dee didn’t seem to mind that her boyfriend left her, didn’t even seem to care when he showed up poolside after making his rounds to every dumpster in the neighborhood last Tuesday, finding feces wrapped up in plastic bags. We heard the splashes at three a.m., followed by his shouts about Dee’s unfaithful ass. But mostly we heard Dee’s cackles, reminding us how hard it is to sleep when you can’t distinguish your own footsteps from your neighbor’s.
None of us have ever set foot in the pool for as long as I’ve been here; maybe because Vernon, the landlord, has never once cleaned it, but mostly because nobody ever taught none of us how to delight in the water, how to swim without gasping for breath, how to love our hair when it is matted and chlorine-soaked. The idea of drowning doesn’t bother me, though, since we’re made of water anyway. It’s kind of like your body overflowing with itself. I think I’d rather go that way than in some haze on the floor of a crusty apartment, my heart out-pumping itself and then stopping.
This morning is different. The way Dee’s laugh swirls upward into a high-pitched sort of scream before it wanders into her bellow. When I open the door, she’s standing there, by the railing, like always. Except today she faces toward the apartment door and the pool keeps her backlit so I can’t see her face, can only see the way her cheekbones bob like apples in her hollow skin. I close the door before she sees me.
Some mornings I peek my head into Dee’s unlocked door just to make sure she’s still breathing, writhing in her sleep. In some ways I don’t mind her neurotic laughing fits because they tell me she’s alive, her lungs haven’t quit on her yet. If Dee’s still laughing, not everything has gone to shit.
The knock on our apartment is two fists, four pounds, and I should have known it was coming, but it still makes me jump back from the door. It ain’t that I didn’t see Vernon making his rounds or the flyer flipping up and drifting back into place on Dee’s door as she stared at it, still cackling. I turn and look at my brother, Marcus, on the couch snoring, his nose squirming up to meet his brows.
He sleeps like a newborn, always making faces, his head tilting so I can see his profile, where the tattoo remains taut and smooth. Marcus has a tattoo of my fingerprint just below his left ear and, when he smiles, I find myself drawn right to it, like another eye. Not that either of us has been smiling lately, but the image of it—the memory of the freshly rippling ink below his grin—keeps me coming back to him. Keeps me hoping. Marcus’s arms are lined in tattoos, but my fingerprint is the only one on his neck. He told me it was the most painful one he’d ever gotten.
He got the tattoo when I turned seventeen and it was the first day I ever thought he might just love me more than anything, more than his own skin. But now, three months from my eighteenth birthday, when I look at my quivering fingerprint on the edge of his jaw, I feel naked, known. If Marcus ended up bloodied in the street, it wouldn’t take much to identify him by the traces of me on his body.
I reach for the doorknob, mumbling, “I got it,” as if Marcus was ever actually gonna put feet to floor this early. On the other side of the wall, Dee’s laughter seeps into my gums like salt water, absorbed right into the fleshy part of my mouth. I shake my head and turn back to the door, to my own slip of paper taped to the orange paint. You don’t have to read one of these papers to know what they say. Everyone been getting them, tossing them into the road as if they can nah, nigga themselves out of the harshness of it. The font is unrelenting, numbers frozen on the flyer, lingering in the scent of industrial printer ink, where it was inevitably pulled from a pile of papers just as toxic and slanted as this one and placed on the door of the studio apartment that’s been in my family for decades. We all known Vernon was a sellout, wasn’t gonna keep this place any longer than he had to when the pockets are roaming around Oakland, looking for the next lot of us to scrape out from the city’s insides.
The number itself wouldn’t seem so daunting if Dee wasn’t cracking herself up over it, curling into a whole fit, cementing each zero into the pit of my belly. I whip my head toward her, shout out over the wind and the morning trucks, “Quit laughing or go back inside, Dee. Shit.” She turns her head an inch or two to stare at me and smiles wide, opens her mouth until it’s a complete oval, and continues her cackle. I rip the rent increase notice from the door and return to our apartment, where Marcus is serene and snoring on the couch.
He’s lying there sleeping while this whole apartment collapses around me. We’re barely getting by as is, a couple months behind in rent, and Marcus has no money coming in. I’m begging for shifts at the liquor store and counting the number of crackers left in the cupboard. We don’t even own wallets, and looking at him, at the haze of his face, I know we won’t make it out of this one like we did the last time our world fractured, with an empty photo frame where Mama used to be.
I shake my head at his figure, long and taking over the room, then place the rent increase notice in the center of his chest so it breathes with him. Up and down.
I don’t hear Dee no more, so I pull on my jacket and slip outside, leaving Marcus to eventually wake to a crumpled paper and more worries than he’ll try to handle. I walk along the railing lined in apartments and open Dee’s door. She’s there, somehow asleep and twitching on the mattress when just a few minutes ago she was roaring. Her son, Trevor, sits on a stool in the small kitchen eating off-brand Cheerios out of their box. He’s ten and I’ve known him since he was born, watched him shoot up into the lanky boy he is now. He’s munching on the cereal and waiting for his mother to wake up, even though it’ll probably be hours before her eyes open and see him as more than a blur.
I step inside, quietly walking up to him, grabbing his backpack from the floor and handing it to him. He smiles at me, the gaps in his teeth filled in with soggy Cheerio bits.
“Boy, you gotta be getting to school. Don’t worry ’bout your mama, c’mon, I’ll take you.”
Trevor and I emerge from the apartment, his hand in mine. His palms feel like butter, smooth and ready to melt in the heat of my hand. We walk together toward the metal stairwell, painted lime green and chipped, all the way down to the ground floor, past the shit pool, and through the metal gate that spits us right out onto High Street.
High Street is an illusion of cigarette butts and liquor stores, a winding trail to and from drugstores and adult playgrounds masquerading as street corners. It has a childlike kind of flair, like the perfect landscape for a scavenger hunt. Nobody ever knows when the hoods switch over, all the way up to the bridge, but I’ve never been up there so I can’t tell you if it makes you want to skip like it does on our side. It is everything and nothing you’d expect with its funeral homes and gas stations, the street sprinkled in houses with yellow shining out the windows.
“Mama say Ricky don’t come around no more, so I got the cereal all to myself.”
Trevor lets go of my hand, slippery, sauntering ahead, his steps buoyant. Watching him, I don’t think anybody but Trevor and me understand what it’s like to feel ourselves moving, like really notice it. Sometimes I think this little kid might just save me from the swallow of our gray sky, but then I remember that Marcus used to be that small, too, and we’re all outgrowing ourselves.
We take a left coming out of the Regal-Hi Apartments and keep walking. I follow Trevor, crossing behind him as he ignores the light and the rush of cars because he knows anyone would stop for him, for those glossy eyes and that sprint. His bus stop is on the side of the street we just crossed from, but he likes to walk on the side where our park is, the one where teenagers shoot hoops without nets every morning, colliding with each other on the court and falling into fits of coughs. Trevor slows, his eyes fixated on this morning’s game. It looks like girls on boys and nobody is winning.
I grab Trevor’s hand, pulling him forward. “You not gonna catch the bus if you don’t move those feet.”
Trevor drags, his head twisting to follow the ball spin up, down, squeaking between hands and hoops.
“Think they’d let me play?” Trevor’s face wobbles as he sucks on the insides of his cheeks in awe.
“Not today. See, they don’t got a bus to catch and your mama sure won’t want you out here getting all cold missing school like that.”
January in Oakland is a funny kind of cold. It’s got a chill, but it really ain’t no different from any other month, clouds covering all the blue, not cold enough to warrant a heavy jacket, but too cold to show much skin. Trevor’s arms are bare, so I shrug off my jacket, wrapping it around his shoulders. I grab his other hand and we continue to walk, beside each other now.
We hear the bus before we see it, coming around the corner, and I whip my head quick, see the number, the bulk of this big green thing rumbling toward us.
“Let’s cross, come on, move those feet.”
Ignoring the open road and the cars, we run across the street, the bus hurtling toward us and then pulling over to the bus stop. I nudge Trevor forward, into the line shuffling off the curb and into the mouth of the bus.
“You go on and read a book today, huh?” I call out to him as he climbs on.
He looks back at me, his small hand raising up just enough that it could be called a wave goodbye or a salute or a boy getting ready to wipe his nose. I watch him disappear, watch the bus tilt back up onto its feet, groan, and pull away.
A couple minutes later, my own bus creaks to a stop in front of me. A man standing near me wears sunglasses he doesn’t need in this gloom, and I let him climb on first, then join, looking around and finding no seats because this is a Thursday morning and we all got places to be. I squeeze between bodies and find a pocket of space toward the back, standing and holding on to the metal pole as I wait for the vehicle to thrust me forward.
In the ten minutes it takes to get to the other side of East Oakland, I slip into the lull of the bus, the way it rocks me back and forth like I imagine a mother rocks a child when she is still patient enough to not start shaking. I wonder how many of these other people, their hair shoved into hats, with lines moving in all directions tracing their faces like a train station map, woke up this morning to a lurching world and a slip of paper that shouldn’t mean more than a tree got cut down somewhere too far to give a shit about. I almost miss the moment to pull the wire and push open the doors to fresh Oakland air and the faint scent of oil and machinery from the construction site across the street from La Casa Taquería.
I get off the bus and approach the building, the blackout windows obscuring the inside from sight and its blue awning familiar. I grab the handle to the restaurant door, open it, and immediately smell something thundering and loud in the darkness of the shop. The chairs are turned over on the tables, but the place is alive.
“You don’t turn the lights on for me no more?” I call out, knowing Alé is only a few feet away but she feels farther in the dark. She steps out from a doorway, her shadow groping for the light switch, and we are illuminated.
Alejandra’s hair is silky and black, spilling from the bun on top of her head. Her skin is oily, slick with the sweat of the kitchen she has spent the past twenty minutes in. Her white T-shirt competes with Marcus’s shirts for most oversized and inconspicuous, making her look boyish and cool in a way that I never could. Her tattoos peek out from all parts of her and sometimes I think she is art, but then she starts to move and I remember how bulky and awkward she is, her feet stepping big.
“You know I could kick you outta here real quick.” Alé strides closer, looks like she’s about to perform the black man’s handshake, until she realizes I am not my brother and instead opens her arms. I am mesmerized by her, the way she fills up space in the room like she fills up that drooping shirt. Here, I settle into the most familiar place that I have ever lived, her chest against my ear, warm and thumping.
“You best have some food in there,” I tell her, pulling away and turning to strut into the kitchen. I like to swing my hips when I walk around Alé, makes her call me her chava.
Alé watches me move and her eyes dart. She starts to run toward the kitchen door just as I rush there, racing, pushing each other to squeeze inside the doorway, laughing until we cry, spreading out on the floor as we step on each other’s limbs and don’t care about the bruises that’ll paint us blue tomorrow. Alé beats me and stands at the stove scooping food into bowls while I’m on my knees heaving. She chuckles slyly as I get up and then hands me a bowl and spoon.
“Huevos rancheros,” she says, sweat drip-dripping down her nose.
It is hot and fuming, deep red with eggs on top.
….
Note: Above are quotes and excerpts from the book “Nightcrawling: A novel by Leila Mottley”. If you find it interesting and useful, don’t forget to buy paper books to support the Author and Publisher!
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