THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG, Author Leila Mottley's sophomore novel...worth the wait

THE GIRLS WHO GREW BIG
LEILA MOTTLEY
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

On the ALA's 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence longlist.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller Nightcrawling, here is an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.

Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, who weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.

The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.

Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends’ secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A worthy follow-up to Mottley's debut novel...link to my 4.5* praise for it is at the top...and one that evokes a strong sense of a place both radically different (cosmetically) and exactly the same as Oakland in Nightcrawling. "No matter where you go, there you are" said Peter Weller in the cult movie with the long title I don't want to type.

Kiara's siblings in trappedness in this book are Adela, Simone, and Emory. Not one scintilla of good luck, or often enough good sense, between 'em. This is what really makes the read come alive for me. These three young women are all pregnant, one again, and teenagers. Their little Peyton-Place-y gossip factory, Padua Beach, has written them off. They gravitate together to give mutual aid and comfort, often as the only source of help for each of them. "Family" is usually best found in this story. They're there for each other because there's no one else willing to do what's needed, more than the minimum anyway.

Not one girl had an abortion; not one impregnator has done one damn helpful thing. Welcome to the world rapist Kavanaugh and christian nutball Coney Barrett were elevated far beyond their capabilities to enable.

You know you're not gettin' away from here without hearing about how stories can and should give the reader a dose of empathy expansion and exercise.

I think the most important reason to read *this* book at *this* moment is that the stories of each narrator are told from her PoV. It's all too frequent for a book on this kind of intimate scale, dealing with this intimate, very personal topic, to be narrated from the outside. Instead Author Mottley chose to tell us the stories of these young women in their own eyes, how it looks to them not someone standing aside, not involved with the necessary action of pregnancy. Of course there is a certain, if not penalty then effect on the narrative pacing. Very like pregnancy itself, the first two-thirds of the young mothers' tale is just slow, it sort of meanders and makes its way through their experiences; and then that last third is non-stop. I'm reluctant to quote lines out of their context because there are spoilers, but believe me: Author Mottley delivers on her literary promise.

If you go into the read forearmed, permaybehaps you won't experience the impatient, finger-tapping sense of "get on with it!" that marked me down as a four-star reader. The last ~125 pages will be well worth your time, I assure you.

We're sliding into some dark days. These three young women are your cicerones to a way out: They are the people we need to focus on helping. Knowing how they feel should make that easier. Anf you'll really enjoy a well-told story.

NIGHTCRAWLING, new voice in fiction from Oakland (!)

NIGHTCRAWLING
LEILA MOTTLEY
Alfred A. Knopf
$28.00 hardcover, available today

Now an Oprah Magazine Favorite Book Of 2022!

One of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2022

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A NEW YORK TIMES WRITER TO WATCH - A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system--the debut of a blazingly original voice that "bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole" (Tommy Orange, best-selling author of There There)

Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent—which has more than doubled—and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed.

One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.

Rich with raw beauty, electrifying intensity, and piercing vulnerability, Nightcrawling marks the stunning arrival of a voice unlike any we have heard before.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Nineteen! NINETEEN!! Author Mottley is all of nineteen, twenty minus one. And she's written this amazing, full-throated roar of defiance in the face of the overwhelming, outrageously powerful white hegemony that controls Oakland and California as a whole. I am revolted that this story flowed as naturally as a river does to the sea out of Leila Mottley, but it did and readers should bear witness with her as Kiara, at a revoltingly early age, learns that men will pay her to use her body for their pleasure.

It's a painful awakening. It's a godsend of money. It's a trap, it's baited with the exact things Kiara needs to walk into the trap, and it's painfully obvious that her world is over. It's a new world entirely, now that she's the one paying the rent.

I will say that, to the sensitive fleurs among us, this story will not go down well. It's honest, it's angry, it takes nothing from you and gives everything to you, and it's a gift so bitter that it makes you wish you hadn't opened it because now you know and can't pretend you don't.

We're always trying to own men we don't got no control of. I'm tired of it. Tired of having to be out here thinking about all these people, all these things to keep me alive, keep them alive. I don't got no air left for none of it. Maybe {her frenemy} is right, it's time to let go, to let one of them take over, take care of me. But I can't stop thinking about {the} call, if {her brother} is alright, if maybe he's got enough money to help us out.

In the middle of a dreary afternoon spent doing something horribly hard, watching her mother as she dies, avoiding a gang of teens who could easily have decided she was a target, riding a bus on a hot afternoon and getting into her rent-due apartment...she wonders how she can help her older brother. Because now, next to making the rent, she's got a much, much bigger problem: How to keep that brother alive. Literally not-room-temperature alive.

That {bad moment from childhood}'s sort of what this feels like: the helplessness of it. Like standing on the road that leads to here and noticing a path you didn't know existed and not being able to take it. Like the road that leads to here was never the only road and time made me forget that until these sobbing moments when I remember, when the fog clears and I'm looking back and there's a fork on the ground, another way.

That ought to ring a bell in us all. If you're an adult, you most likely found yourself nodding along and recognizing those emotions. You'll likely recognize the others about regrets and about consequences and about prices you can't pay to avoid. This is that kind of a story, it's that kind of a world that Kiara and her wide found family live in. And those who make it out? They change addresses. They can't really change when so much around doesn't. This life is what you make of it, true, but is your inward being as malleable as all that?

What makes me so happy is that Author Mottley is here, is the one telling the story to my white-person eyes. I'm so happy that someone in publishing saw this manuscript, heard this rage-filled, sorrow-drenched scream of pain and said, "there's a proud, fine writer being born here, let me put the privilege and prestige of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., behind it and make people listen." So, listen: If you're wondering if this isn't more misery porn, or worse, disaster tourism, then I'm going to bring it to you fresh, this ain't that. (My Texas bleeds through when I want to make sure y'all're listening.)

When I was in the agenting business many long yars ago, an ancestor of this story came across my desk. I loved it. I loved its vernacular honesty and I loved its visceral reality. I wanted to make people read it...stop them in the halls of our building and say "just this bit right here! you'll love it!" and I was talked out of it. See, I'm white, and male, and even then that meant my privilege wasn't going to sail that beautifully loud sound-cloud out onto the lakes of white-people culture. Publishing might be doing better, but it's still the world where I was told to my face by an editor about a non-fiction book by and about African-Americans (as the polite term was then) I wanted her to buy, "who will buy it? Black people don't read."

Thirty years on I'm still appalled by that memory.

And thus it's extra delightful to me that I'm reading this auspicious debut from a young Black creator with the colophon of a very, very distinguished house that made its cultural capital a century ago by taking just these sorts of chances. (Joseph Hergesheimer won't mean much to most of y'all, but he was quite a noise on the 1917 Knopf list....) I couldn't do it; someone could, though, and that it's taken this long to make the waves it's already making (LitHub loves it, forevermore! That's Establishment imprimatur enough right there!) is, well, for me personally both validating and frustrating. I wish I'd done it; I'm thrilled it's been done.

Don't deny yourself this treat. I can't say I liked Look Homeward, Angel a whole lot, but it was a clarion call, a loud voice in full cry, saying, "there's a new way to do this!" That's what Nightcrawling is, that loud voice. Spend some extra time with her and learn what will make you sad to know.