Sky Daddy (Book Review)

Title: Sky Daddy

Author: Kate Folk

Format: Hard Cover

Rating: 2.5 Stars

Before picking up this book, I saw several five-star reviews saying it was a hilarious story about a woman who was sexually attracted to airplanes. It sounded weird enough, and erotic enough to be a great read, but once again, I was let down. This description of the book does capture what it’s about, on a surface level. But the book I read goes so much deeper. This book could have gone in several different directions, and I feel like the author just missed the mark on all of them, because of that I feel like something was missing. Other than its uniqueness for being weird on the surface level, the book just doesn’t have much else going for it.

Reading while watching for planes.

 Warning: review contains spoilers beyond this point

I don’t know if I’ve taken too many college classes, but I couldn’t stop thinking about literary analysis, specifically the lenses of psychoanalytic criticism and feminist criticism. Of which this book would lend itself well to. For me, this book was more about Linda’s obsession with planes than it was her sexual attraction to them. The sex was just the way she coped with the underlying obsession. The plane could have been any object, situation, or fantasy. In fact this book read exactly like the obsession trope in any book about mental illness. That’s one way this novel could have (and in my opinion, should have gone). The other possibility is that the author could have made this funnier and erotic. Had she leaned into the sexual aspects, more than the obsession with numbers, and flights, and the fantasy the protagonist has about death, this book would have been one of a kind, and the book that I thought I was picking up based on some of the reviews I read.

Linda’s goal was death by plane crash. She mentioned this several times throughout the novel. She admits she wants to die in a plane crash to Karina, and she admits it again at her mother’s birthday party. She admits this in the end by saying, “I’m about to evict myself from the world.” She says that she hopes the rest of her life is short, and she hopes people will forget about her. It’s very clear to me that this is a story about a woman who’s passively suicidal. She’s not trying to kill herself, but she wants to die and fantasizes about dying in this very specific way. Linda is also very impulsive throughout the novel. From one flight to another she goes from wanting to never think about planes again, to admitting they’re all she can think about. In the end, she decides to live a normal life. It was very clear to me that the near plane crash when she was a teenager triggered this trauma response in the protagonist, who walked the line somewhere between fear and excitement. Physiologically, fear and excitement are the same emotion, it is just our brain that interprets the emotions differently. I don’t think Linda was afraid of flying; I just think she’s more obsessed with the idea of death than she is the actual planes themselves.

The ending of the novel annoyed me because the author chose to leave it open to individual interpretation, and that made me feel like the ending was rushed. I would have preferred this novel to have a more defined ending. Did she die, did she live, did she get help with her mental health? In the moments before the book ended, Karina was smiling. She said she knew, but we don’t know what she knew at that moment. Did she know they were about to die? Did she know Linda was obsessing about death again? This book dragged on long enough and obsessed deeply enough that I really think the readers deserved a clear ending.