Book Review: Sky Daddy by Kate Folk

Linda is a woman in her early 30s who is sexually attracted to airplanes. Yes, she’s aware this is – unusual. That doesn’t stop her from living as frugally as she can, to save up as much money as possible for ‘dates’ with these fine denizens of the sky. She knows that her friends and family would find her true desires horrifying, and she’s accustomed to keeping them hidden. But thanks to the surprising effectiveness of a vision board, over the course of Sky Daddy, Linda must confront what it means to share her weird wishes with the world.

Kate Folk’s previous book, Out There, was a wonderfully bizarre collection of short stories, and you might think she would have turned the ‘woman fancies airplanes’ premise into one of those, at the most. A 350 page novel though? The ballsiness of even imagining such a thing is difficult to fathom. Miraculously: it works!

It helps that Folk never shies away from the silliness or the strangeness of the situation. She clearly has fun trying to think through the practicalities of Linda’s atypical sexuality – in her mind, for one example, the underbellies of planes that fly over us all the time are akin to, well, a human undercarriage. When she’s trying to be abstinent, later on in the novel, she wears a peaked cap to hide her view of all those tempting mechanical parts flying above her in the sky. Sky Daddy is not just a comedic book, but it embraces the preposterousness of its own premise with very funny results.

Beyond that, however, Folk also manages to give Sky Daddy a surprising emotional resonance. Linda’s particular sexuality is very specific, but her knowledge of her difference and the way it affects how she interacts with the world feels far more universal. She’s lonely. Among her few friends and associates, she’s always trying to behave in a way she considers to be normal, even though it doesn’t come naturally to her. When Linda bonds with Karina, another woman she works with at her online content moderation job, she struggles to understand how she could possibly like her; the way her self-esteem is boosted by this genuine connection is both sweet and uplifting. While Linda’s been so wrapped up in the business of keeping her own thing a secret, she’s failed to notice that everyone has something about themselves they’d be embarrassed to share with the world; something that makes them feel a little bit alien. Ultimately, ironically, those are the things that makes us the most human.

So the novel continues, with Linda secretly trying to manifest her ‘marriage’ to a plane (what that actually involves is another showcase of Folk’s immense tonal dexterity) all the while forging ever more connections with the people who populate her daily life. And somehow, by the time we get to the end of the book, Folk has managed to wrap up all the disparate emotional parts in a way that’s both satisfying and ambiguous.

Or to put it another way: Sky Daddy does indeed, stick the landing.

★★★★★

Sky Daddy is published by Sceptre on 10 April 2025