A deeply serious issue made personal. Readers will want to do more in their own communities. Will be talked about for a long while.

An excellent book but a very hard subject to read about. A very raw depiction of poverty and exploitation, but still with so much hope. Can’t say that I enjoyed reading this book as the subject matter disturbed me but a very worthwhile read and a very talented story teller.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC

This book is a searing exploration of survival in a broken system. Kiara’s life in Oakland is painted with sharp edges, where every moment teeters between hope and despair. It is gripping, intense, and deeply human, with prose that crackles with emotion. Kiara’s resilience and vulnerability stay with you long after the final page, making this novel a powerful and unforgettable read.

I’ve tried to read this book so many times and keep coming back to it but I think it’s ultimately time to say that I don’t think this book is for me.

This is most definitely a ‘me problem’ rather than the book’s problem as this is a really well-loved book. I think if it does sound interesting to you, you should still definitely give it a go.

It was an incredibly unique novel. I loved the author's note that the end of the book explaining her motivation to write the book. That being said, sometimes I found the pace of the novel to be inconsistent. Anyway, looking forward to reading future novels by this author.

This was a very thought-provoking debut novel. Kiara's story is one that is going to live with me for a long time. It touches on the vulnerability of Black and Brown women in an environment where they are not protected.

I loved Kiara's tenacity, her trying to protect the men in her life (when it wasn't her responsibility), and most especially, her relationship with her neighbor, Trevor.

The author started writing this book when she was 17 and lived in Oakland, so her experiences are reflected all over this story.

Highly recommend this book!

Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley. Pub Date: June 7, 2022. Rating: 4 stars. In this debut, the reader is taken on a journey through a young black female's eyes as she navigates her difficult life. Her mother is not present, her brother is chasing a dream of being a rapper like their uncle and the young boy next door has been abandoned and she feels responsible for him. Money is tight and she finds herself enmeshed in a police scandal in which the police are using her for sex in exchange for "safety" and sometimes money. The scandal is brought to the surface when one of the police commits suicide and specifically lays out the scandal in his final words. Tough subjects were navigated in this thought provoking novel, but important nonetheless. It is heartbreaking to realize that situations like this can exist in the world. The author did a tremendous job at navigating emotions, thoughts and feelings of a young black female set in a horrific situation. I can't believe this was a debut and the author was a teenager when she wrote it. Very well done and I highly recommend. Thanks to #netgalley and #knopf for this e-arc in exchange for my honest review. #nightcrawling

This is an incredible debut. Nightcrawling is moving and at times tough to read. Mottley brings her characters to life and draws the reader into their lives. Mottley doesn't try to sensationalize their situations, but presents them in a realist way.

It isn’t every day, week, month or even year that a first-time novelist bursts onto the scene with the acclaim of publications like the New York Times or celebrities like Oprah. It’s even rarer that the author is only in her teens. But such is the case with Leila Mottley and her startling, incisive debut, NIGHTCRAWLING.

Seventeen-year-old Kiara and her older brother, Marcus, have managed to just barely scrape by in the years since their father was wrongfully imprisoned and killed because of his years without access to stable healthcare and their mother succumbed to the stress of depression. Only a few years apart and a heartbeat away from one another, the siblings have paid the rent on their family’s studio in Oakland. Even though neither of them were able to graduate high school or embark on ambitious careers, they’ve found a careful balance in their apartment building full of families with stories like theirs and mothers who know how to care for children they didn’t birth or raise.

But with gentrification and inflation, their landlord has just doubled their rent, and for the first time their demise seems imminent instead of possible. While Kiara takes to the streets every day to beg for work --- her humiliating lack of a resume preventing her from even the easiest jobs, the ones privileged people claim that “anyone” can do --- Marcus has become obsessed with making it as a rapper, a goal as ungrounded in reality as winning the lottery. As Kiara watches her family disappoint her yet again and begins to take charge of the care and support of her neighbor’s nine-year-old son, she indulges in one mindless drunken encounter that shapes the trajectory of her life.

With limited options and even more limited hope, Kiara resorts to gut-wrenching, humanity-reducing get-togethers with men for as low as $50. Early on, she meets a sex worker named Camila who urges her to find a “daddy,” another man who can claim to own her and call it safety. But she quickly sees that this is yet another form of imprisonment and strikes out on her own. Still, her combination of naivety and desperation land her smack in the crosshairs of Oakland’s finest, and they have their own angle on the exploitation of women.

Before long, Kiara is tied to several members of the Oakland Police Department --- men she knows only by vague descriptions and badge numbers --- who call on her to add a female touch to their poker games, to be traded by their “brothers” on their birthdays, and to give up every last scrap of belief she had in the justice system (which wasn’t much, given the stories and experiences she already has observed in her community). Even more cruelly, the men often refuse to pay her, choosing instead to recognize their transactions with tips on which parties will be raided, the honor of sharing a bed with them for a night, or forcing her to watch loved ones get arrested under false pretenses while she walks away “safe.”

All the while, Kiara watches as her community, family and personal life fall apart, and the deepest, most unholy corruptions of the justice system expose themselves to her, showing off their seedy underbellies only to turn right around and maul her.

Kiara’s life changes --- and not, of course, for the better --- when an internal investigation into the actions of members of the police department results in an explosive leak. It shakes up the airwaves, dazzles the media, and suggests for the first time that someone somewhere might care about the indulgences and criminal abuses of power of the men who swear to uphold and protect. But justice is a long, dangerous operation. Kiara knows better than most that having a name, a face and, worst of all, a woman’s body often means that while justice may come, it never comes without a terrible price.

As Kiara falls deeper and deeper into sex work (read: exploitation --- and of a minor, no less), Mottley writes, “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.” These lines not only perfectly embody Kiara, who wants so badly to do “right” --- to find a job, earn a living, maybe even one day pay taxes --- they also speak to the crisis of a generation, a class, a race. Even in Kiara’s own life, a world where she and her best friend regularly crash funerals for free food, she is often judged for her choices and scolded for her desperation. But what makes these actions so crushing is how frequently and desperately she tries to embark on the life her country has promised her.

Kiara is a gorgeously written character. She is neither supernaturally wise nor childishly naive, but perfectly situated in the middle. She is world-weary, but occasionally devastatingly hopeful and then immediately disappointed in herself for wanting more. At the same time, the world Mottley crafts is sharp and vivid, dazzlingly real and unapologetically frank in its reveals about the deepest levels of corruption and abuse.

With a ripped-from-the-headlines premise and a character with an unforgettable voice, NIGHTCRAWLING has all the hallmarks of a book so evocative of a time and place in the American justice system that it seems impossibly prescient. But what Mottley has done with her characters, her electrifying prose and her urgent call for action makes her debut an instant classic.

I didn't enjoy this book-- It felt like it was written by a child. I think the author didn't really understand the situations the characters were in. I wouldn't recomend this book.

This book is heavy and infuriating and heartbreaking, and yet there's also something beautiful and hopeful about it. It touches on so many issues -- poverty, abandonment, exploitation, addiction, and racism, which are all a reality in the world we live in, but not things that children and/or young adults should have to shoulder.

This was a great but tough read! I knew I had to be mentally prepared for this type of story! It’s an urban fiction of dealing with tough neighborhoods and life on the streets. And something terribly goes wrong so now it’s do you fight or flight knowing that society sees what you have to do to survive instead seeing the real you, the struggling you!

Love the author’s note explaining the need to write this story and needs to be told more!

Thank you NetGalley!

Nightcrawling is an immense achievement to be written by such a young talent. It hangs heavy, with triggering themes, but the novel is gritty, resilient, and honest.

An accomplished debut by a young author. Her language was gorgeous and hard-hitting. The story was emotional, full of dread and hopelessness. Despite the bleakness, it ends on a semi-hopeful note. It was an eye-opening read, and while it wasn't a pleasant one due to the subject matter, it was absolutely worth it.

This was an interesting one, there were parts that I didn't enjoy or felt took away from the story but also parts I found really interesting and that really pulled me into the story. Overall a 3 star read for me.

I can't quite put my finger on why, but I lost interest about halfway through this title. Something about the police interactions. The dialogue did not connect for me.

I was a little weary when I approached this book as a review possibility. I'm glad I did take a chance on reading something that was out of my usual genre. While it took a bit to fall into the style of writing in the first couple of chapters, the story keeps you moving throughout the pages as you follow a young girl, trying to make it on the streets of Oakland. Oakland is a town near and dear to our main characters heart, as is her brother and the boy down the hall, Trevor, who is pretty much on his own after his mother doesn't return home. In order to make the monthly rent, Kiara must try to find ways to make a quick dollar since her brother is set on making it in the music industry but has yet to bring a penny home. While trying to figure out how to make it all work, Kiara finds herself in an awkward position, ending in a large amount of money being handed over by a gentleman she met that night. This one experience leads Kiara down the road of making difficult decisions and finding her way through uncomfortable situations with the best intentions in mind. The story is loosely based on true events that happened in the Bay Area. I found the narrative and thought process to be very well thought out and mature, especially when I found out how young the author was. After finishing the book, I felt it was very well written and a very intimate expression of a young persons thoughts and experiences on the streets of a large city. While the topics didn't bother me in this story, there could be triggering ideas and hard to read narratives for some readers that pick up this story.

"Nightcrawling" by Leila Mottley is a gripping and potent debut that showcases a raw and unfiltered look at the underbelly of society through the eyes of Kiara, a young woman cornered by the inescapable pressures of systemic poverty and injustice.

Set against the backdrop of a dilapidated East Oakland, Mottley breathes life into the character of Kiara, whose resolve and resilience are pitted against the crushing instability of her world. Her life, already teetering on the edge due to socioeconomic brutality, devolves into nightcrawling, a term that takes on multiple meanings as Kiara navigates the perils of the night to survive.

Kiara’s relationship with her brother, Marcus, is a heartbreaking depiction of the love and tension that can coexist in family ties strained by adversity. Marcus’s dream for a better future through music stands in stark contrast to the bleakness that surrounds them. Further humanizing the narrative is Kiara's care for her young neighbor, a storyline that underscores her complexity and the tough choices she faces.

Mottley's prose is powerful and lyrical, with a pulse that beats with the urgency of Kiara's predicament. The author tackles themes of exploitation, corruption, and systemic abuse without flinching, holding a mirror up to the realities that many overlook or choose to ignore. Kiara's involvement in the Oakland Police Department scandal is both a plot device and a societal commentary, revealing the pervasive nature of power imbalance and the vulnerability of those caught in its wake.

Through Kiara's eyes, "Nightcrawling" explores the dynamics of a community bound by hardship and the flickers of hope that occasionally penetrate the darkness. Mottley's storytelling is immersive, and readers can't help but be moved by the authenticity of the protagonist's voice and the raw honesty of her journey.

Gut wrenching and poignant, this is the story of Kiara. She would do anything for her brother and friends-even if that means falling into night crawling by accident , and helping to bring down corrupt cops taking advantage of it. A great read.

Night crawling is a very tough book to read. The depiction of the characters could not be more desperate than they are in this story.V while I felt the book was extremely well-written with an enormous maturity that seems to be beyond the author’s age-I did feel uncomfortable with the endless,barrage of bleakness in the book. I’ve never lived the life of the central characters so I can’t say if the novel is accurate or not. It portrays a very bleak world of immense poverty and despair. I look forward to reading the next book this author puts forward.