Our September book club selection is Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley, a former Oakland Youth Poet Laureate who wrote the manuscript for this debut novel the summer after she graduated from high school.
The book deals with some pretty heavy ripped-from-the-headlines topics – abuse, incarceration, police corruption, murder – but also, as Lou Fancher put it in an East Bay magazine article, “Nightcrawling is not all trauma and pain…It is also a richly complex love letter to Oakland and a profound tribute to Black youths and their joy, love, integrity, humanity, frailty, courage and more. It portrays full-spectrum Black life, and it matters.”
We’ll be discussing it at the library September 12 from 6:30-7:30pm – hope to see you there!
