The blurb, the hype, and the titillating title of Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy may look as cute as an A320, but for me the book does little else than roll around the runway. “Call me Linda.” is a BOLD choice as it pays homage to and proudly compares the novel to Herman Melville’s Moby-dick: “Call me Ishmael.” So the big question is whether or not Sky Daddy is successful.

Only such a cosmic force could bring about my dream of marriage to a plane-what others vulgarly refer to as a "plane crash.” I believed this was my destiny: for a plane to 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.

Admittedly, Sky Daddy portrays obsession well, however, the novel suffers from length—it should have been a novella or long fiction. Nearly all of the human relationship attempts and even the VBB (Vision Board Brunch) meetings could have been nixed because it made the obsession with the aircrafts weaker. I hope Folk didn’t feel required to add human love interests to attract a mainstream crowd, but I think that’s what happened. There’s this need in contemporary fiction to have the reader relate with a work’s characters that simply isn’t part of the literary tradition (see Aristotle’s Poetics). A Linda with tunnel vision for steel rather than placating to flesh would have been more procompelling.

For most of this book I find myself asking why I’m reading it and there is really only one reason: Kate Folk’s protagonist is funny. Linda offers up one-liners and terms that made me chuckle as if reading a Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett. One of my favorites is: “postcoital debris”. Unfortunately, the humor isn’t enough for me to widely recommend this work nor would I reread it. Sky Daddy promises weird but it only flies with one engine; I wish it committed more to the monomania and less to completing the societal checklist.