Book Review: Sky Daddy by Kate Folk ★★★⯪☆

shkspr.mobi@edent2026年01月19日 12:34
Book cover featuring a phallic plane.

What - and I cannot stress this enough - the actual ever-loving fuck!?0

OK, perhaps it was a mistake to start reading this while on an international flight. The book concerns Linda, a content moderator at an endlessly sub-contracted tech company, who is in love with planes. No, strike that, she is excessively sexually attracted to the idea of dying in a plane crash.

Yeah.

The story goes though all her attempts to, effectively, manifest an in-air disaster through the power of wishful thinking and frantic masturbation.

This isn't exactly erotica1, it contains a rich stream of satire about the modern tech industry and how it chews up and spits out the people working at the sticky end of keeping platforms safe.

This is one of the most creative novels I've read in some time. The protagonist is a creepy blank-slate whose unhealthy obsession drips off the page2. Her morose existence is - to mix fantasies - a car crash. I can honestly say that I haven't read anything like this before and I've no idea if I'm the intended audience.

I wouldn't necessarily describe the book as fun and enjoyable, nor is is particularly sexy3. It is intriguing, entertaining, and constantly baffling. How wonderful to step inside the mind of an utter deviant and soak up their bizarre existence.

  1. Every other paragraph made me scribble WTF in the margin. ↩︎

  2. Not that there's anything wrong with that! ↩︎

  3. Look, you probably shouldn't do an armchair diagnosis of fictional characters but this is possibly the most autistic-coded character I've read since In Search of Lost Time. ↩︎

  4. Unless, I guess, you're in to that sort of thing. YKINMKBYKIOK! ↩︎