We’re all just pursuing love in some form, right?

George Eliot describes marriage as both a ‘bourne’ and ‘a great beginning’ at the end of Middlemarch, in which we see examples of marriages as both endings and beginnings. Kate Folk’s debut novel might be said to be a book about the search for beginnings and endings through marriage too, though it comes with a bit of a twist: where Eliot’s marriages were between women and men, the marriage sought by Folk’s narrator, Linda, is between herself and an airplane – ‘what others vulgarly refer to as a plane crash’.

When Linda gets an invitation from her coworker, Karina, to a quarterly vision board brunch (that’s a brunch where everyone presents a selection of images attempting to visualise and manifest their current life goals, for those of you who, like me, might not have been aware of such things before), Linda feels certain that an important step is being taken to finding her ‘soulmate: whichever plane would finally recognise my worth and claim me as his bride in orgasmic catastrophe’.

What makes Sky Daddy more than a quirky fetish novel and Linda more than an object of pity and morbid fascination is the way in which Linda’s fantasy life runs alongside developments at her workplace, Acuity, a web content moderation company where Linda works in Hate and Harassment, ruthlessly applying the mantra that ‘The [Terms of Service} is all that matters… My own opinion is irrelevant’, ‘happy to be paid twenty dollars an hour to flatter a machine that would soon replace’ her. The deadpan awfulness of Acuity is lit up by the burgeoning friendship between Karina and Linda, and complicated by Linda’s semi-accidental involvement with a senior figure whose own personal quirks Linda exploits for free air travel.

Ultimately, these relationships allow Linda and her desperate seeking for what is, really, just simple fellowship in a world in which she is almost totally isolated and isolating, to resonate with the reader, and to turn her story into a tragi-comic commentary on making connections in modern life. After all, ‘Like dating, death by plane crash was a numbers game.’ Folk’s ability to hit the reader with one-liners like the preceding sentence, and to weave them into a story that allows for tenderness and empathy with even her more marginal characters, elevates Sky Daddy to a debut novel whose author’s career this reader will be following with interest.