Book #48 for 2022: Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley - Book Bingo: N
Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
An almost completely blind read for me; my first impression of this was that it reminded me of a couple of S.E. Hinton Books I read at school - "The Outsiders" and "Rumble Fish" - because it was about teenagers growing up without parents.
So, the main character and narrator, Kiara, and her brother Marcus, have lost their father; their mother is in a rehab centre, seemingly as a result of an incident that led to the death of their younger sister.
As I read further into the book, I was reminded of Angie Thomas' "The Hate You Give" with its themes of race and injustice.
Kiara and Marcus are struggling to pay for their cost of living; he is unwilling to get a job, and she ends up making a living by becoming a prostitute. She also often finds herself looking after a boy called Trevor, whose mother is constantly disappearing, often for several days.
The only real issue I had with this book was that its blurb told me too much about the plot, making it sound like it would be all about Kiara testifying about police corruption. This happened quite late on in the book, after the police started exploiting Kiara for sex.
Overall though, it was a really good book; very sad in places, and full of social commentary. It felt like something that could really happen, and not surprisingly, the police don't come off very well. I was constantly guessing what would happen next, and the conclusion ended up a little more open-ended and bittersweet than I had expected.
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This gets me a book beginning with "N" for the 2022 ljbookbingo challenge; four to go!
Agatha Raisin and the Fairies of Fryfam (M.C. Beaton)
Big Panda and Tiny Dragon (James Norbury)
Crawling Horror (Edited by Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf)
Desperation (Stephen King)
Every Contact Leaves a Trace (Elanor Dymott)
Facebook: The Inside Story (Steven Levy)
Girl, Woman, Other (Bernadine Evaristo)
House with No Doors (Jeff Noon)
I
Just Like You (Nick Hornby)
Knife Edge (Malorie Blackman)
Little Deaths (Emma Flint)
Mindset (Dr. Carol S. Dweck)
Nightcrawling (Leila Mottley)
O
Peter Darling (Austin Chant)
Quidditch Through the Ages (J.K. Rowling)
Round the World in Eighty Days (Jules Verne)
Survivors (Marcus Blakeston & Mark Astronaut)
The Truth is Out There (Thomas Bertonneau and Kim Paffenroth)
Under the Greenwood Tree (Thomas Hardy)
V
Wyntertide (Andrew Caldecott)
X
Y
Zoo City (Lauren Beukes)