The premise of Sky Daddy sounds like peak weird girl lit: an unusual erotic fixation, death fantasy, obsession masquerading as destiny. As a lover of weird girl lit, I thoroughly enjoyed the taxiing portion of the flight. At take off (first third of the book), I was still excited for where this trip would take me, but after that initial lift off, the flight never hit cruising altitude for me. Instead, I felt more and more disappointed like I had mentally prepared for a Biscoff cookie for my complimentary in-flight snack, and instead received the crushed crumbs of approximately 5 unsalted mini petzels.

For a book centered on eroticized death and obsessive fixation, Sky Daddy plays it so safe that it was as thrilling as the plane's safety pamphlet. Instead of weird girl lit, it's giving weird girl lit lite where I can't prove that this was written for "cool girls" to laugh about how outrageous this book is - "She wants to have sex with PLANES!" - Meanwhile the weird girl lit target audience is left scratching their heads, wondering if they accidedntly boarded the wrong flight. (It reminds me vaguely of when 50 Shades of Grey was released/popularized)

What The Book Did Well There is undeniable boldness in the premise, and the novel allows Linda's fixation to exist without overt moralizing. The prose itself is fine - I appreciated that Linda's voice remained steady throughout the duration of the flight. Finally, there is a clear thematic thread about authenticity and acceptance which is always nice.

Where The Flight Crash Lands For Me - Ladies and Gentlemen, the Captain has turned on the fasten seat belts (SPOILERS) sign. For your safety, please disembark now if you do not want to have the book spoiled for you. Content Warning: Suicide/suicide adjacent topics

In sum: The novel repeatedly approaches psychological risk but never fully takes off.

Even her being sexually attracted to planes - in my opinion - feels underdeveloped. From the blurb "Linda's secret is that she's sexually attracted to their intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages and powerful engines that make her feel a way that no human lover ever could." However, much of her arousal appears mediated through sensation, specifically the vibration from turbulence and projection rather than literal object desire. That ambiguity could have been psychologically rich territory, but instead stalled out. When she has sex with a human man, she imagines his penis is a bit more plane-shaped (kind of). Maybe I'm being too literal, but this is weird girl lit!! You could have explored the conceptual line between fetish, trauma response, and symbolic fixation but instead the psychological depth was on autopilot.

The novel escalates events - Linda engages in increasingly risky, impulsive sexual encounters on flights (including being caught on camera mid-flight with a work superior midact), drains her bank account on 17 back-to-back one-way flights hoping to be "married (aka die in a plane crash) to her dream plane until she runs out of money and decides she will just live in teh O'Hare airport scavenging food from trash cans while waiting for slow death.

But despite all the escalation, her interior reckoning does not deepen proportionally. There are literally no real consequences at all in the book for anyone.

The trauma exploration was circling the airport but never landed for me. We learn that when she was 13 years old she was on a flight withher family that experienced violent turbulence that made her believe she was going to die. This was also her last family vacation because her father abandoned her family shortly after this trip. Instead of digging into this unhealed trauma and how it manifests in her obsession, the information is presented almost casually and then barely touched again.

Later revelations from her family undermine the severity of the turbulence (her mother doesn't even remember the flight or the trip), yet the narrative never meaningfully interrogates that contradiction. Was her perception exaggerated because she was a child? is her memory unreliable? The text never attempts to sharpen it.

Similarly, Linda's characterization gestures toward multiple psychological frameworks (depression, suicidality, dissociation, neurodivergence) without fully committing to exploring any of them in depth. The result is a protagonist that felt suggestive - layered in signals, but thin in synthesis.

We never actually explore her death fantasy and what it would mean in reality. Her true dream to be "chosen" by a plane for eternity aka married. Marriage, in this case, means crashing the plane with her (and all of the other passengers) on board. She flies, at minimum, once per month. Whether this is suicidal ideation, fatalistic delusion, or dissociative surrender (that psych minor finally coming in clutch!), the novel never probes it. Her death wish (and being responsible for mass casualties) simply exists, barely acknowledged.

This leads me to the lackluster landing of the novel: For so much escalation - public "scandal" (that went nowhere without any real consequences), being ostracized by her family and several friends, airport homelessness awaiting slow death - the resolution centers on someone else's growth!! The one friend she made along the way conquers her fear of flying to fly across the country to rescue Linda, and directly states that she refuses to be held hostage by fear, surrending to fate if she must. After building an entire novel around Linda's obsession, the emotional climax belongs to her friend, who Linda recently betrayed and sabotaged her working on her fear of flying btw. Her friend doesn't even co-pilot the resolution; she is the sole pilot of the resolution. Linda herself remains largely unchanged, rescued instead of transformed.

Because she is rescued, Linda decides/notes that she can probably get a new job, a new apartment, and doesn't need to die. When she is teed up to show any real growth, she directly shows us she has made no meaningful growth, and her friend intervenes again, gliding the landing into a new, little bow.

Final Thoughts Sky Daddy promises wild turbulence but ultimately opts for a commercially safe, smooth landing. The most frustrating part? The book knows what it is selling. The blurb promises Linda will choose between normalcy and launching herself toward her dream, but she's denied even this agency, she's rescued instead! It markets itself as a "subversive" examination of desire and acceptance, but never reckons with what it means to "accept" someone whose greatest dream involves mass casualties. The vision board magic that is supposed to spin her life out of control feels less like narrative escalation and more like plot convenience, moving Linda around the flight map without requiring her to make real choices or face real consequences.

For a book about obsession and annihilation, I was ultimately bored enough that I wanted to exit through the emergency slide before we even got to part 3.

Scoring Breakdown Personal Enjoyment: 1.5/5 (maybe 2/5 if you include the joy I got writing this review. Execution (Did the book do what it set out to do): 1.5/5 Writing & Craft Quality: 3/5 Characters: 2/5 Plot: 2/5