Linda is attracted to planes—not as a hobbyist, but she does display an enthusiast’s ardor and knowledge. While she has a flight-tracking app on her phone and can identify the type and number of an aircraft by sight, for Linda, the 30-year-old protagonist of Kate Folk’s novel Sky Daddy, these flying hunks of metal are erotic objects. She maps the language of human romantic relationships onto her attraction, giving all the planes male pronouns and admiring their “ankles” and “rear ends.” She assigns them personality traits like flirtatiousness and zeal, and deems them “playful” and “girthy.” There’s a good deal of talk about thrust. Vastly preferring the company of aluminum and steel to people, Linda claims that planes are sentient and respond to her in turn. She saves up her meager pay as a low-level employee at a tech company so that once a month she can take a cheap flight from SFO to a crappy regional hub. The destination doesn’t matter; Linda gets on the plane to get off—secretly masturbating during each flight, or “date,” as she puts it.

But mere dating isn’t enough for Linda. She also wants to get married—i.e., die in a plane crash. There’s an ostensible basis for Linda’s objectophilia: a shared love of planes with her now-deceased father and a very turbulent flight she took with her family when she was 13. Sky Daddy, however, is not much concerned with so-called sexual deviancy or even how specific fetishes are born. The narrator’s obsession instead functions as a stage on which the author plays out the pain and pleasure of trying to form human connections, especially when a person feels she can’t share something as essential as sex with others.

It says something that the query “What if a woman thought her destiny was to die in a plane crash because she believed it would merge her soul with said plane?” is one of the least unusual of Folk’s conceits. In her first book, the well-received 2022 short story collection Out There, Folk took several intriguing what if’s and pushed them to their extremes. What if a head began growing out of your floor? What if people were attracted to each other’s internal organs instead of their legs, eyes, or smile? What if dating-app bots took physical form as tall, muscular men with personalities as dull as butter knives?

Out There’s protagonists hurtle toward self-annihilation, and are willing to take others with them, revealing the fissures within their relationships. With the greater real estate of the novel, Folk traces both the forming and the breaking of such connections. If some of the immediacy of the stories is lost in Sky Daddy, Folk ramps up other aspects of her writing, like its wry humor. A protagonist like Linda could easily be portrayed as cartoonish, but her self-effacing charm and kindness turns out to show Folk’s skill with characterization as well. For instance, when an HR rep at Linda’s workplace tries to pacify employees with coffee from Starbucks after the office is vandalized—including human shit found on someone’s desk—Linda hopes an exiting employee “knew she could use the gift card at any location.” At one point, Linda describes herself, in earnest, as being able to “pass as a forty-year-old methamphetamine user or a fifteen-year-old victim of human trafficking.”

Folk revels in mapping out Linda’s outlandish pursuit. According to her author’s note, the novel is in “casual conversation” with Moby-Dick—though the homage is clear from the jump. (One guess what the first line is.) Like Ishmael needing to leave dry land whenever he feels himself “growing grim about the mouth,” Linda becomes “edgy and irritable” when she’s been on the ground for too long. And not unlike a certain ship’s captain who loses his leg to a whale and then fashions a prosthetic one from whale bone, Linda carries with her a chunk of a plane’s hull. It’s from the same model that was involved in the traumatic flight her family took when she was young. The small piece of metal functions as a talisman, a binky, and, more importantly, a sex toy.

Linda becomes both “prophet and fulfiller” in her quest, not only regularly taking to the skies to increase her chance of marriage (and death), but also employing a good dose of magical thinking to tip the cosmic scales in her favor. The latter comes by way of Linda’s coworker and only friend, Karina, who turns her on to vision boards: woo-woo craft projects Karina and her friends present to each other during quarterly brunches.

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The women in Karina’s circle are confident and successful; their boards are girl-boss-ifications of personal and spiritual fulfillment: yoga and meditation retreats, promotions, children. Meanwhile, Linda pastes together stock images of jetliners and the chief executive of Airbus without revealing her full desire. “‘So you want to marry a CEO?’” one woman asks. (“‘Why does she have to date a CEO? She could be one herself,’” another chides requisitely.)

These recurring scenes capture the way women, especially in groups, can disguise criticism as concern, passive aggression as blanket positivity—and throw into relief the disturbing resemblance between some women’s ideas of good lives. Sure, Linda’s sexuality may be abnormal—a fact she’s very aware of—but these women are no less weird in their supreme conformity. The brunches also underscore just how hard it is for Linda to fit in, at least by her own measure. Even when the women receive her warmly, she still feels out of place.

Rather than a maritime epic, Sky Daddy might more closely resemble a marriage plot—with all the obstacles and complications that pop up along the way. (The pun to use here would be Linda and the planes “circling” each other, a will-he/won’t-he kill me in a fiery orgasmic crash.)

One of the biggest hurdles Linda faces in achieving her happy ending is money. To afford her frequent flights, she forgoes comfort and even groceries, living in a windowless apartment above a garage in the Outer Sunset area of San Francisco and subsisting on free work snacks. There’s an amusing, if familiar, tech workplace novel laced throughout Sky Daddy: Linda and the other content moderators at Acuity, a video-sharing site, get paid 20 bucks an hour—$15 after taxes, she notes—to flag content that violates the site’s terms and conditions. While the “mods” comb through hate speech and bestiality videos, they’re also training the AI software that will eventually replace them. Rather than a decent wage and healthcare, these nonunionized workers are offered “perks” like free lunches and nine-minute wellness breaks sitting atop a deflating yoga ball.

When a man with money to burn enters Linda’s life, he both aids and complicates her single-minded mission. Dave, a higher-up at Acuity who’s nearly two decades her senior, is still reeling from his divorce and willing to take (and, more importantly, pay for) spontaneous flights with Linda.

A traditional plot would see Linda “grounded” by Dave, wrangled into a more acceptable sexual arena while still letting her exercise her unconventional desires, albeit in a significantly tamed manner. Folk avoids a pat conclusion—a happily-ever-after with a dash of kink— in part because, as a suitor, Dave is in no way suitable. (I’d also rather die in a plane crash than date a guy like Dave.) Though kind, he’s cloying, a little cheesy, and treats Linda more as a tool in his post-divorce recovery than as her own being. “I realized that Dave cared about my personal story only for the insight into his own it could provide him,” she notices early on.

The only other human romantic option is a mildly slimy dude whom Linda matches with on a dating app. She agrees to meet him only because he says he’s a pilot. (He’s not.)

Although Dave’s main allure for Linda are those free flights, he also allows her to try on a relationship with a human—and all the emotional negotiations that come with it—with no possibility of real romance. And so he functions as a kind of straw man, proffered as a foil or source of conflict without being able to meaningfully inhabit that role.

Dave is of a piece with the male characters in Folk’s short stories; they’re not egregiously offensive but are inattentive and complacent. In Out There’s title story, in which AI humanoids have taken over San Francisco’s dating scene, the protagonist can tell her love interest is human because he sucks at asking her questions. In “Shelter,” a woman with a neglectful boyfriend entombs herself within a wall of their house, all but ensuring her demise. There’s a flip remark that can be made about the alternatives Folk presents to her female characters in the face of these disappointing dudes. Romantic life getting you down, ladies? Try fucking a machine and then also dying. Glibness aside, Folk’s fiction does reflect a truism: that many heterosexual American women have grown disappointed with dating men and are deprioritizing romantic relationships.

Folk’s male characters are not necessarily one-note or diminutive—though they can be—but one does wonder what else we might see in her thought experiments if these women were afforded more attentive partners on occasion. It leaves an open question on the table: What would women do if their desires were met by men? Sky Daddy skirts the issue by centering a character who, because of the nature of her sexuality, is not so much trying to date and finding her options lacking as one who has opted out of the social economy of dating and romantic relationships with people altogether.

If there’s a romance in Sky Daddy, it’s the burgeoning friendship between Linda and Karina. Like the other brunch women, Karina can at first come across as a little basic. (Her first board is plastered with wedding imagery.) The other women criticize Karina’s goals, but Linda remains nonjudgmental. So appreciative is Linda of Karina’s friendship, and so acutely aware of her own social awkwardness, that it doesn’t occur to her that she’s a good friend in turn or that Karina might value her just as much.

Folk presents the pair with some obstacles of their own, but Sky Daddy eventually arrives where a lot of contemporary pop culture about heterosexual sex and relationships does: with female characters championing their friends, imperfections and all, and supporting each other’s aspirations. By one measure, it’s a somewhat safe, even quaint, place to land: After time apart, Karina and Linda reunite, then board a plane together. By another, it’s a far more dangerous ending, that of the Thelma and Louise variety, with two women embracing their shared fate and refusing all else.