Book Review: ‘Sky Daddy’ by Kate Folk (when a woman falls in love with…a plane?)

The second I saw the synopsis for ‘Sky Daddy’, I knew that I needed it and I ran straight to NetGalley. The NetGalley gods (aka lovely publishers) granted my wish and I was set and ready to go.

With a few long flights coming up in April, I decided to save it for that and I have to admit that I think reading ‘Sky Daddy’ on a plane and during a long layover in an airport just made the reading experience of this so much more fun.

Linda makes $20 an hour as a content moderator, flagging comments that violate a tech conglomerate's terms and conditions. Each night, she returns to the windowless room in a garage that she rents from a family who pretend she isn't there.

But once a month, she escapes to San Francisco International Airport for a clandestine meeting on the cheapest flight out that night. Linda's secret is that she's sexually attracted to planes: their intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages and powerful engines make her feel a way that no human lover ever could.

Linda believes her destiny is to someday 'marry' one of her suitors by dying in a plane crash, a catastrophic event that would unite her with her soulmate plane for eternity. So when her co-worker Karina invites her to join a group of women using vision boards to manifest their desires, she can't resist the chance to hasten her romantic fate. However, as the vision boards seem to manifest items more quickly - and more literally - than Linda had expected, the carefully balanced elements of her life begin to spin out of her control, and she must choose between maintaining the trappings of normalcy or launching herself headlong towards her greatest dream.

It sounds immediately wild and the actual novel itself carried that through and I really, really loved it.

Even before the deep, weird plane stuff begins, ‘Sky Daddy’ is dark because of Linda’s job as a content moderator (think ‘We Have Had to Remove This Post’ by Hannah Bervoets, but Linda loves her job instead of hates it). Her life revolves around her work hours, she’s the top moderator in her section and she appears to feel passionate about ‘digital hygiene’, and her only friend is her colleague. It’s a sad bubble of a life and Linda isn’t necessarily likeable, but she also is likeable and sympathetic at the same time, even in her very alien (to me) sexual fixation and the her vague contentment with her isolated life.

As we get to know Linda, we also get to know her unusual sexual appetites: she is sexually attracted to planes and her aim in life is to marry one aka die in a plane crash. She has a particular fixation on one particular plane that she experienced extreme turbulence on when she was a teenager which awakened her sexuality and that was decommissioned many years ago. It’s absolutely fascinating and the way that Kate Folk communicated Linda’s desires and feelings was really vivid and so well done; it never felt like she was laughing at Linda or belittling her in her desires, it was just Linda’s truth.

One of the most interesting elements of the novel, and one of the sadder ones, was Linda’s acceptance of how she was treated by the people in her life. She lives in an illegally converted garage without a window of the Chen family house, and the way that they pretend she doesn’t exist and threaten to kick her out when she makes herself known was so uncomfortable, made even more so when their college age son, Kevin, casually and conversational derides her over and over again and Linda doesn’t even really register how unacceptably she’s being treated. This also continues a little into her liaison with her boss, even though she gets a bunch of free flights out of the arrangement and it ultimately ends in her favour, but the beginning is her being swept along in something that she really doesn’t want. Linda’s entire agency about her life is obtaining her marriage to a plane.

I was hooked on Linda’s story from beginning to end and it kept me company during a flight and a 4+ hour late night layover, making the time fly by. I loved it and I’m really, really excited to see what else Kate Folk has written and will write in the future.

Thank you to Sceptre and NetGalley for the review copy.

Written by Sophie