Sky Daddy
by Kate Folk
I want more of this. Whatever this is. A story about weird people? A very intense friendship story?
I stayed up way past my bedtime reading and then woke up so stupid early to finish this wild but amazingly well written story. I’m going to give you the most brief synopsis of the plot I can without spoiling the fun of reading it.
Linda is in love with airplanes.
Not with flying, not with pilots, not with traveling and going from one place to another on planes. With the actual airplanes, right down to knowing them by their tail number. And by love I mean the kind I have for my husband, not the kind of love I have for the new case I just bought for my Kobo reader. Linda’s soulmate is an airplane.
Telling you more would deprive you of the joy of the story, because the way that it unfolds is absolute poetry. It is a weird beautiful multifaceted thing that you should experience for yourself. If you’re the kind of person who can’t imagine the world as being anything different than how you experience it, this is not a book for you. You gotta be open for a ride and ready to just go where the ride goes.
As I was reading, I was thinking a lot about my fear of flying. I’ve talked to other people who have different levels of fear, and I know that there are people who don’t/won’t fly. And then there is me. I fly reluctantly. 80% afraid, 20% not afraid. I would road trip anywhere in the continental US but for time. So I book that flight, the anxiety builds, I think about canceling a hundred times, then get to the acceptance phase where I think my fate is sealed, and then I go about with my flight, overspending in airport shops and eating my favorite snacks like they don’t have food at my destination.
There are also people who love to fly; who just get on planes like no big deal. Even people who go to school to fly them regularly on purpose. I’d never really thought of it as a spectrum, and I guess everything is really. Human preferences for things vary so widely and I think the very very edge of that spectrum would include Linda. Far far away from where I am on the spectrum, probably. And it was truly interesting to go over there for a while.
There is actually a lot to this story, and the more I process it (including re-reading the last few chapters) the more important the friendship between Linda and Karina feels. Their friendship story is kind of quietly lurking around the very loud story of Linda and her love for airplanes.
I think it gets a little dark at the end. But I also think that the darkness is very open to interpretation.
In my first read of the last few chapters, I thought that the underlying theme of the story was friendship, or being friends with someone no matter who they are or what they had done. There was a nice moment in the airport where Linda & Karina realized that they were still friends despite knowing each others’ flaws and secrets, and I found that really touching. I reflected on their other scenes, on how Karina showed up at Linda’s VBB even though they hadn’t been talking, on how she tracked her down to Chicago, and had that awwww moment.
And then I reread the last few chapters and think I caught something a little darker. Something that tracks with the Karina character a little bit more.
- Karina has been punishing herself for her role in the death of the “weird girl” at her high school by working at Acuity
- She also seems to be punishing herself by going to the Vision Board Brunches as it seems pretty clear she isn’t happy when she goes and she’s envious of the lives the other women live.
- She doesn’t seem to believe in the vision boards until Linda’s starts working
- Linda’s last vision board indicated that she was trying to manifest a plane crash
- Karina decided that death would be the ultimate punishment (or end her pain) and tracked Linda down to meet their shared destiny
We don’t find out for sure if the plane crashes, though the smoke and “held her hand until I could hold it no more” certainly implies that it did. At the end of the story though, I’m not sure Linda cares or wants that anymore, though she probably thinks it’s going to happen. BUT it’s Karina who wants it now. She wants relief from the pain she suffers from, and so she’s at peace getting on the plane with Linda. She even called Anthony to say goodbye.
I cried the first time I read it during the next to last chapter, then cried in the last chapter during my reread when I had my realization of everything above. I love a good book.
