PositiveThe Sydney Morning Herald (AUS)Predation and the systems of exploitation that women and girls of colour endure in contemporary America are the driving forces of this novel. Kiara is your classic YA protagonist – brave, resilient, sensitive, and golden-hearted despite her hardships – but her journey is phenomenally gruelling ... a panoramic portrait of the systems designed to make lives like Kiara’s disposable, and ripe for exploitation. She lives at the intersection of racism, poverty and misogyny, and Mottley’s depiction of that crushing oppression feels vital in this cultural moment. As a novelist, Mottley has a poet’s ear for dialogue. She captures the rhythms of speech – the code-switching of the Oakland streets, the unique language of children and teens, and of slick lawyers and slimy cops – with virtuosic talent ... With that comes a poet’s love of imagery and language. Not one sentence in the novel could be accused of being underwritten ... The writing is rich to the point of distraction. In the space of any given paragraph, the overlapping metaphors build up and mix uneasily, sometimes bordering on being impenetrable ... Between the harder-to-parse writing and the intensity of the story and subject, Nightcrawling is a tough hang. But therein lies its value to readers in Australia, perhaps. In tone, delivery, richness, and sheer heart, Nightcrawling straddles poetics and YA readability while it interrogates hard truths of the world, grappling with cultural reckonings still necessary in this country ... What it lacks in concision it makes up for with delight in the rhythm of language, and the unembarrassed energy of a young author – Mottley was just 17 when she started writing – firing on all cylinders.
