BookBrowse Reviews Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

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An Oakland teenager living in poverty turns to sex work and becomes a victim of sexual violence perpetrated by police.

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In an Author's Note at the end of Nightcrawling, Leila Mottley explains that she began writing the book at age 17, while "contemplating what it means to be vulnerable, unprotected, and unseen." Mottley's protagonist Kiara Johnson is all of these things, and her story is a testament to how these factors limit a person's agency.

At the beginning of the novel, 17-year-old Kiara receives a rent increase notice from her landlord, who has just sold the building in East Oakland where she lives with her brother Marcus. Their father is dead and their mother is living in a halfway house while on parole, having committed a devastating crime that is not revealed until the novel's midpoint. Marcus has been caring for Kiara as her legal guardian, but now he refuses to look for a job, having become fixated on achieving rap stardom like their Uncle Ty. After losing her virginity in a coercive sexual encounter with a stranger, Kiara realizes that sex work could be the answer to her money problems; after all, it's "nothing more than a body," and the situation will only be temporary until she figures something else out. But then she is caught by a police officer, who instead of arresting her takes her into the back of his car and forces her to have sex. This is only the beginning of Kiara's ordeal, as she is violated by a number of members of the Oakland Police Department, who sometimes pay her for sex and sometimes insist that their so-called protection is payment enough.

Mottley demonstrates the breakneck speed with which a young person might careen from a relatively stable existence into one defined by sexual exploitation. Every door of opportunity is slammed in Kiara's face and virtually everyone who might be expected to support or care for her (including the state) has checked themselves out of her life. The plot depicting the tumble down this rabbit hole is suspenseful without being overly dramatic or maudlin; it is completely believable that these things would happen to a person like Kiara, who is racially and socioeconomically marginalized in the ways that she is. She feels at first as though she is making active choices, but she is really reacting — taking the only path forward in a labyrinth of dead ends until she is trapped in the center with nowhere left to go.

Kiara's interior monologue is shot through with the dreamy, poetic sensibility of a young person who comes to see the world as it really is, but nevertheless has not lost hope. She sees the people she meets stripped of the fanfare of how they present themselves to the world. Camila, a sex worker who acts as a mentor to Kiara, appears to be a model of poised self-confidence, but Kiara comes to recognize how this is an act Camila performs to feel more in control:

"Camila is not a glowing woman walking free, walking godly. She is a woman who survives, even if that survival means tricking herself into believing this world is something it is not, that her life is all glory."

Kiara also comes to understand her own needs more fully — "And I 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" — and that expressing and pursuing those needs in the face of systemic abuse is a radical act.

Nightcrawling has deeply perceptive commentary on gender, race and class that defies the comfortable assumptions readers might bring to a story like Kiara's. Two female police officers, one of whom is the interim police chief during an internal investigation, treat Kiara like a nuisance and attempt to silence her, demonstrating that there is no gender solidarity within the power structure of the police department. These women act to support the male officers that have harmed Kiara because maintaining the structural soundness of the police force is more important to them than supporting a woman who has been sexually abused. One female officer breaks the mold, giving Kiara vital information and the number of an attorney. However, Mottley presents her as naive in comparison to Kiara, who has been forced to learn how rotten to the core the system is. The attorney who preps Kiara for the grand jury trial is equally out of touch with reality, at one point telling Kiara that her decision to testify puts her in a class with Harriet Tubman and Gloria Steinem. In response, Kiara thinks, "In moments like these, I remember Marsha's just another white woman who's never gonna understand what I been through, who can't find anyone besides Harriet Tubman and Gloria Steinem to compare me to."

But there are other women in the novel who show up for Kiara in whatever ways they can — women who understand her life because it is not so different from their own. Mottley also writes in her Author's Note that she wanted the novel to illustrate the fact that "Kiara—like so many of us who find ourselves in circumstances that feel impossible to survive—is still capable of joy and love." She renders Kiara's relationships with tender care, allowing her protagonist to have a blossoming understanding of herself and the people she loves that is genuinely joyful. Kiara is victimized, but she is also fed meals prepared by the hands of a beloved. She creates art and plays basketball. She makes a pancake so big it requires two sets of hands to flip. There is more in the world of this book for Kiara.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in September 2022, and has been updated for the May 2023 edition. Click here to go to this issue.