Penguin Random House
Published April 8, 2025
It's safe to say that we in the Bay Area are used to kinks of all kinds. Folsom Street Fair and its ilk barely merit an eyebrow lift these days. So when I picked up San Francisco-based Kate Folk's debut novel Sky Daddy, I was expecting more of the same. It wasn't. Instead, it is the tale of Linda, a thirty-year-old who works at a job in tech in San Francisco. She earns $20 an hour (more like 15 after taxes), lives in an illegal box room with no windows in the Sunset, and would love more than anything to marry an airplane.
If you are confused by this, not to worry. Linda, a pleasant narrator in the way that a chatbot attempting to be human is, tells us immediately what this means. Her deepest desire is that a plane will “recognize me as his soulmate mid-flight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity.” To put it bluntly, she wants a plane to “choose” her so they can die in a plane crash together.
Linda's small world revolves around this obsession. She spends her evenings hanging out at a bar near SFO so that she can “ogle planes” in between her monthly flights. Turbulence brings her to climax, and she is prone to phrases like “a beefy Boeing 777.” During her flights, she inserts a chunk of decommissioned 737 into herself and... lets the plane take the lead.
She sees planes as sentient beings (they are always men) and speaks about them as such. “I tapped my fingers flirtatiously along the edge of his door. I placed my palm against his outer shell, which would soon be exposed to the thin upper atmosphere with a temperature of negative 60 degrees. As I entered him, I glanced into his cockpit, which always felt obscenely intimate.”
Linda's deadpan narration of her desires and the world around her is comedic, but also deeply melancholy. While this could easily be a book of one-liners and corny erotica, Folk's storytelling and well-crafted words lead us down a different path. Linda's loneliness and deep longing for human connection reaches from the pages and forces you to empathize.
She spends her days moderating content for a video-sharing platform, teaching AI how to identify inappropriate comments on online posts. Her job will soon become obsolete, and she knows it. We find that she desires human connection as much as she fears it. Knowing that her sexual preferences would be mocked, she locks that part away and plays at being a “normal person.” When work friend Karina invites Linda to a Vision Board Brunch (VBB), she accepts. Knowing that her hope for love would likely be seen as obscene, Linda crafts a board with the narrative that she would like to marry a pilot. To her surprise, the Vision Boards seem to hold power, and Linda is drawn in.
As she enters a world of upper-middle-class women previously unknown to her, Linda learns that Karina is also an outcast of sorts. The friendship between the two deepens. And with the new connection comes the uncomfortable host of emotions of what it means to care.
Set against the corporate/tech backdrop of a society that places the importance of AI over people and screen addiction, a love affair between a plane and a woman doesn't seem so very strange. Folk does an admirable job making each person in Linda's orbit to be deeply relatable, if mildly reprehensible at times. From the beautiful Karina to the recently divorced mid-manager Dave, who wouldn't understand a boundary even if one clothes-lined him out of spite, every character in Linda's life teaches her something new on her journey.
While the book lands around 350 pages, it never falters in its storytelling and bizarre humor that is Folk's own brand. I do not recommend reading this before a flight if you are even a little wary of flying. The story is unexpected, unhinged, and unfailingly honest in its telling. You will come to love Linda, and more, to understand her. Heavier than it appears at first glance, this is not an easy read, but it is a worthy one.
