Leila Mottley - Nightcrawling

Rookie Season: Debuts | Week 66º

Aug 08, 2024

Extra seasoning for your everyday food for thought

Genre: Coming-of-Age, Urban Fiction

“I say I don’t believe in nothing, except something about the way the night colors everything makes me want to.”
— Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

Back Cover (Vintage Books):

“Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by on their own in East Oakland. Both have dropped out of high school. 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 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 a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.”

Ask yourself: What happens when those sworn to “protect and serve” turn into monsters who “use and abuse?” Nightcrawling, the 2022 debut novel by American author Leila Mottley, is a gritty exposé of those horrors come to life, sinister forces of police brutality, unbridled power, corruption, and sexual exploitation of young Black bodies in Oakland, California, by law enforcement.

From jump, it’s clear that no one is looking out for our novel’s protagonist, Kiara, who lives in a rundown East Oakland apartment with her older brother, Marcus. Their father is dead and their mother is in prison. Given Marcus’s singular focus on pursuing a rap career rather than finding a job, and with eviction notices piling up, Kiara decides to drop out of school in search of work; but, with no resume or discernible job skills, the search for gainful employment leads to failure after failure and heartbreak upon heartbreak for Kiara, who turns to sex work to make ends meet.

Given her young age, Kiara’s ill-equipped to deal with the harsh realities of streetwalking. But, will a chance encounter with a police officer ultimately lead to Kiara’s salvation or further ruin?

Nightcrawling (along with many other honors, including an Oprah’s Book Club selection1), was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize,2 making Mottley the youngest author to date to have been nominated for the award.

In an author’s note accompanying her debut, Mottley stated, “When I began writing Nightcrawling, I was seventeen and contemplating what it meant to be vulnerable, unprotected, and unseen. . . . Kiara is an entirely fictional character but what happens to her is a reflection of the types of violence that black and brown women face regularly; a 2010 study found that police sexual violence is the second most reported instance of police misconduct and disproportionately impacts women of color.”3

“Letting the streets have you is like planning your own funeral. I wanted the streetlight brights, the money in the morning, not the back alleys. Not the sirens. But, here we are. Streets always find you in the daylight, when you least expect them to. Night crawling up to me when the sun’s out.”
— Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling

Did You Know?

Did you know that at age sixteen, while a student at Oakland School of the Arts, Leila Mottley was chosen as Oakland’s 2018 Youth Poet Laureate?

Tell Me More . . .

Founded in 2012, the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate (OYPL) program4 is an unprecedented citywide effort to celebrate literacy through poetry and connect young writers to far-reaching opportunities.

Each year OYPL accepts applications from talented Oakland writers (ages 13-18) to join a community of young poets. The program is run by the Oakland Public Library with support from the Friends of the Oakland Public Library.

Some Food For Thought:

As quoted in a 2018 Oakland Post article,5 Leila Mottley (then a sixteen-year-old literary dynamo with a passion for social justice) revealed her hope to use her Youth Poet Laureate title to address local issues in her beloved city of Oakland, stating, “I really want to focus on giving voice to the harrowing experience of displacement for youth in our communities, so I’m really excited to see what I can do.”