Kiara Johnson is seventeen, a high-school dropout in East Oakland, living with her older brother Marcus in an apartment complex grandly named the Regal-Hi. Their family has been fractured by death and prison; Marcus dreams of rap stardom and makes no money; the rent has more than doubled; and Kiara has quietly taken charge of Trevor, the nine-year-old next door, abandoned by his mother. Job hunting fails, and one night a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the work she never imagined: nightcrawling — walking the streets for pay. The money keeps the three of them housed and fed, and then her name surfaces in an investigation, and she becomes a key witness in a scandal inside the Oakland Police Department — a case, drawn from a real one Mottley read about at Kiara's age, in which the officers sworn over the city are themselves the danger, and the girl they used is the one asked to answer for it. Mottley, Oakland's Youth Poet Laureate of 2018, wrote the novel at seventeen; published in June 2022, it was chosen for Oprah's Book Club — at nineteen she is the youngest author ever selected — and became a New York Times bestseller, a poet's novel of survival, chosen family, and a city that fails its girls and is loved by them anyway.
Author: Leila Mottley · Original publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 2022