By Leila Mottley (Amazon's #24 Best Book of 2022) ★★★★★
Nightcrawling is the story of Kiara, a young woman three months shy of her eighteenth birthday, living with her brother Marcus in a shitty East Oakland apartment. The siblings are trying to scrape by after their father died and their mother was sent to prison. To complicate things, Kiara feels a responsibility for a 9-year-old neighbor boy named Trevor, whose mother is deep in the throes of drug addiction and hasn’t been seen in months, leaving Kiara as his de facto custodian.
A rent increase is coming and eviction is looming, but Marcus can’t be compelled to contribute much of anything to the household finances as he tries to pursue a rap career. Kiara becomes more desperate to make ends meet as she struggles to find a job that will bring in more cash. With the weight of the world on her shoulders, one night she ends up drinking too much at a strip club where the bartender knows her. She starts chatting with one of the patrons, leaves with him, and things get out of hand. He mistakes her for a prostitute, and in the aftermath of an unwanted sexual encounter, ends up giving her a few hundred dollars. Desperate, Kiara finds herself considering prostitution in order to bring in the cash she so desperately needs.
From that quick synopsis, you can clearly gather this is a tough read. The injustices don’t stop with what I described, and there are several moments where your heart just breaks for this poor girl. But it’s also an incredible profile of a young woman doing anything it takes to survive while dealing with disappointment after disappointment, and you can’t help but root for her. It starkly lays out both the societal privilege many of us take for granted, while acknowledging the set of bad decisions that made an already challenging situation even worse for Kiara and those close to her.
It’s not a book I plan to read again, but boy is it well done, and I’m glad that I read it once.
Previous Best of 2022: #8 - Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Next Best of 2022: #6 - Seventeen: Last Man Standing