Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley is the story of Kiara, a vulnerable 17-year-old girl in Oakland who has relied on her brother Marcus for shelter after their mother abandoned them. But when her brother quits his day job to pursue his dream of becoming a rap artist, the pressure to pay the rent falls on Kiara — not only for herself but for her crack-addicted neighbor’s son, Trevor, age 9, whom she cares for like her own son.

Since she is only 17 and dropped out of high school, Kiara stumbles into prostitution as an answer, one that eventually her at the center of an exploration scheme run by Oakland police officers. While the story is fiction, Mottley based this novel on a 2015 court case in which the Oakland Police Department was accused of sexually exploiting a teenager and trying to cover it up.

Nightcrawling starts stronger than it finishes, with Kiara even more believable when Mottley started writing the novel at about the same age. As the story progresses, Kiara becomes increasingly more intelligent (and not in a street smart way) than her path suggests is possible. This unintentionally dampens any real transformation of the protagonist, leaving the reader memorized by how she handles police threats and her love for Trevor but hollow in understanding how any of the experiences change her or the eventual slow-burn romance between her and her best friend, Alé, who was passive at best when needed the most.

Mottley offers that she wanted a narrative that suggests there is still a capacity to love after abuse, and there is. But one wonders if the narrative is misplaced on society sometimes (and Oakland's specifically) at the expense of what could have been a stronger, more overwhelming internal struggle.