A powerful story based on actual events in Oakland and a testimony to resilience.
The narrator of this unashamedly provocative debut is seventeen-year-old Kiara Johnson, a high school dropout just three months shy of turning eighteen, but already weighed down by the responsibilities of keeping a roof over the heads of her family. Home is an apartment in the insalubrious Regal-Hi complex where the rent has just been doubled and with her Black Panther father dead, her mother in a halfway house and older brother, Marcus, chasing the pipe dream of music stardom, Kiara can only rely on herself. She is also caring for the AWOL addict next door’s son, nine-year-old son Trevor, and after another fruitless day of job hunting she runs into Marcus’s ex who works at a local strip club. One drink leads to several and when a misunderstanding on leaving the club with a customer leads to Kiara losing her virginity the unexpected upshot is a roll of notes being pressed into her hand. Suddenly Kiara has options and tells herself this is nothing more than a stopgap, but when she finds herself a victim of sexual exploitation by members of the Oakland PD, known to her by only their badge number, she finds herself in dangerous territory. When the suicide note of one of the cops involved in abusing Kiara leads to the leaking of her name and eventually to grand jury proceedings it threatens to destroy the few things she holds dear..
The novel uses the actual events of a shocking 2015 sex scandal which saw multiple members of the Oakland Police Department charged with offences including statutory rape in a wide-ranging sexual abuse investigation, although the character of Klara is fictional. The prose is incredibly poetic and as someone who appreciates coherence and clarity in writing I found everything a little too ambiguous. There are moments throughout when the prose dazzles but there are also digressions aplenty, often when I felt the narrative could have done with moving forward and upping the tension as opposed to meandering. Although I found the style and particularly the dialogue required perseverance to engage with, I always wanted to find out how Kiara’s story would end, perhaps because of its real life origins, and this kept me invested.
For all its bleakness, Nightcrawling is not a depressing read and it is shot through with moments of joy and the small pleasures that come with being among those you love and simply surviving when life throws so many obstacles your way. Despite not feeling that Mottley made the most of the implicit tension in a plot which could, and should, have made for a more propulsive read, I did warm to Kiara and ultimately the novel is a powerful testimony to resilience. On a wider level it is also a commentary on the intersecting social injustices of racism, poverty and misogyny and a pertinent reminder of why so many of those from marginalised communities fall between the cracks.
The novel uses the actual events of a shocking 2015 sex scandal which saw multiple members of the Oakland Police Department charged with offences including statutory rape in a wide-ranging sexual abuse investigation, although the character of Klara is fictional. The prose is incredibly poetic and as someone who appreciates coherence and clarity in writing I found everything a little too ambiguous. There are moments throughout when the prose dazzles but there are also digressions aplenty, often when I felt the narrative could have done with moving forward and upping the tension as opposed to meandering. Although I found the style and particularly the dialogue required perseverance to engage with, I always wanted to find out how Kiara’s story would end, perhaps because of its real life origins, and this kept me invested.
For all its bleakness, Nightcrawling is not a depressing read and it is shot through with moments of joy and the small pleasures that come with being among those you love and simply surviving when life throws so many obstacles your way. Despite not feeling that Mottley made the most of the implicit tension in a plot which could, and should, have made for a more propulsive read, I did warm to Kiara and ultimately the novel is a powerful testimony to resilience. On a wider level it is also a commentary on the intersecting social injustices of racism, poverty and misogyny and a pertinent reminder of why so many of those from marginalised communities fall between the cracks.