If we stand on the backs of Black women, who will carry them? Who will water us as we are constantly planting seeds and watering others?
 
Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley was created due to police departments in the Bay Area like the Oakland police department who sexually exploited young women only to cover it up and leave these young women broken, abused, used, and silenced. Nightcrawling tells a story just like this. Where there is no happy ending, Leila gives meaning to the main character Kiara. You get to see her, hear her, understand her sacrifices, and ache because this young girl had to be both a woman and a child. Had to diminish her childhood to survive not only for herself but for others around her.
 
At just 17, Kiara has lived many times over. Set in East Oakland at the Regal-Hi apartments, Kiara introduces us to poverty, rent increase, and Oakland’s gentrification. Kiara lost her father to the system multiple times only to have him released to his death. A mother whose need for her father causes an aching that results in sudden death, a suicide attempt, and her mother in prison. All that Kiara has left is her older brother Marcus, her 10-year-old neighbor Trevor, and her best friend Ale’. Kiara’s mother instinct kicks in as she is a high school dropout with no resume, rent due, and her neighbor Trevor is hungry and without food because his mother has been consumed by drugs.
 
Kiara goes as far as having a funeral day with her best friend. A way to attend services to get free food and clothing left behind while others are mourning. Being unable to find work due to age and lack of a resume, Kiara is now facing her eviction and Trevor’s. Her older brother no longer holding her hand because he wants to live a false dream, but Kiara just wants to ease the hardship. A frustrating day turned into Kiara being drunk and losing her virginity to a white man who thinks she a prostitute. After payment, Kiara calculates how to make a living by becoming a streetwalker. 17 and dressed up, Kiara walking the streets for money leads her on a twisty slope filled with men and police officers degrading her body, her spirit, and mind, but her bills are paid. These same cops start to bring fear through pointing guns at her during sex, threatening to arrest her, and often ignoring paying her because their payment is in protection. As the underground corruption of the police for starts to leak, Kiara not only struggles with the decision of coming forward but must also deal with her everyday life and facing her broken mother. Balancing friendship and love, Kiara is stuck between being a mother and a child.
 
Nightcrawling is not a book to ease your thoughts. Nightcrawling is the means to survive in a world that makes you feel smaller by the second. The shift in structure, accountability, and access. Kiara has 17 years of life but has been aged in mere months. The mental strength it took to tell herself it is just a body. It is just sex. To face the crooked police system with the odds already against her, Kiara finds a way to survive and be loved.

#NIGHTCRAWLING by #leilamottley takes place between Oakland sky and asphalt. This precious sphere contains every single person seventeen-year-old Kiara needs to thrive: her best friend, Alé; older brother, Marcus; and Trevor, the little kid next door. Kiara spends her days looking for a job and finding ways to keep her loved ones sheltered and fed. Her attempts to carve a safe space get much harder as money runs out. Before long Kiara slips from the light of day and we have no choice but to watch the dark grab ahold of her.

At novel's open, Kiara begins her morning like any other. She uses bus passes scavenged from lost and found to search for work and attends funeral gatherings to feed herself. It's all unsustainable, but there is no safety net to rely on. One moment Kiara is on the swings, propelling herself into the dazzling blue and the next she is mistaken for a sex worker. The money she receives is enough to pay the rent, and for Kiara that means everything. If she can keep a roof over their heads, she would walk the streets again and again. But one night she runs straight into the cops, and her life turns into an endless cycle of motel rooms filled with men and their guns and badges. It is graphic and relentless, and I read on. I read on because I needed to see Kiara emerge from the other side, to breathe in the salt of the bay like from before. I read on because it is infuriating that a child can be sexually exploited when they shouldn't be anything other than a whole future lying in wait. And even for Kiara, it ought to be possible still.

Thank you to @aaknopf and @netgalley for providing an eARC for review. I created a #netgalley account on a whim two weeks ago and recognized this title from my own #goodreads shelf. This is a tremendous debut and I’m so grateful I got to read it early. #NIGHTCRAWLING comes out 6/7/2022.

An amazing story about Kiara, a young black woman in Oakland, who has to take to prostitution to try to support herself, her brother, and her young neighbor. A subject and a voice that are new and worth hearing. However, this book is also relentlessly depressing and 98% hopeless, and I was glad when it was over.

Thank you to the publisher for the opportunity to review this book.

What a great debut.
Writing is raw ,gritty and honest.
Looking forward to more from Leila Mottley. She started this one at age 17, she could be one to watch.
Thank you NetGalley for the early copy.

Leila Mottley did an excellent job writing this book. She did justice to the stories of women and girls who have similar experiences as Kiara. The humanization of prostitutes and victims of sexual exploitation is so vital in writing. I can see this book being read in classrooms in the future for not only its story but also its literary value.

I was so quickly deeply engaged with this story and invested in the lives of Kiara and her family. I like that it humanizes her without victimizing her and minimizing her story to the awful things that happened to her. Her joy is a major part of this book even if it has to be caught between pages.

Stories like this are important to remind us of the human impact of the disgusting things police departments do and cover-up. It may be a fictional account, but it represents the reality of many. I think that women who have experienced this would feel justice in the way Mottley told this story.

I am so glad that I read this and encourage everyone else to do so. This book is deeply revealing without disrespecting the humanity and autonomy of women who experience the dangers of sex work.

I was excited about this because it seemed up my alley. I had difficult getting into it and gave up about 20% through. It felt too slow going for me, but I want to give it another try at a later date, especially because it’s received such rave reviews!

"Letting the streets have you is like planning your funeral."

Kiara is seventeen, poor, black, and parentless (one dead, one institutionalized) in Oakland, California. Life's cards have stacked against her. Through an unexpected chain of events, Kiara ends up working as a prostitute--nightcrawling. Her goal is to keep a roof over her and her brother's head and food in their bellies. Her brother, Marcus, who she loves boundlessly and without condition, isn't pulling his weight. He's the older one, but convinced he can make it as a rapper. He spends his days recording and trying to make it big, which mostly means he spends money instead of makes it. Marcus looks away from what Kiara is doing to help them survive; it's easier that way.

There is so much pain in this story: dead parents, neglectful parents, parents that have failed their children in the deepest of ways. Sexual assault. Abuse. Misogyny. Racism. Police brutality. Human trafficking. The list goes on, ad infinitum. And it is beautiful and filled with so much love: between Kiara and Marcus; Kiara and Trevor, her neglected 12-year-old neighbor with a crack-addict mother; Kiara and Ale, her best friend and lover.

It took me a couple of chapters to find the groove. The writing is a bit melodic with a twinge of street. Once I caught the groove, I was hooked, even as I was deeply sad. Reading about what happened with Kiara's mother literally made me feel ill; I gasped aloud as I read along and watched the tragedy unfold. This book is powerful, and it's so hard to swallow that it's based loosely on real-world events. It is also absolutely incredible and shocking to know it was written by a 17-year-old: where do these depths come from? What has she experienced to write these horrors? And where on earth did she learn to write like this? Kudos to Leila Mottley, surely a force to be reckoned with. Highly recommend.

Thank you for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review!

"Nobody believes in God 'cause they got proof, only 'cause they know there's not any proof to say they're wrong."

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 from 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— tells a story that feels like cockroaches are crawling all over our 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!!