📚 Finished reading Sky Daddy by Kate Folk.

So a friend was extolling the virtues of a genre of books I was not over-familiar with - “weird girl fiction”. Apparently there’s quite a community of fans of it on Reddit. So what better way to gain an insight into their mind than reading one of their top recommendations?

The clue to the genre is of course in its name. And this book is indeed about a rather strange young woman who has a voracious, unusual and explicit appetite for aeroplanes. Her life-long obsession is to marry one, although her definition of that is rather macabre (and expensive). Of course she’s trying to arrange that whilst at the same time hiding her peculiar interests from those around her.

It’s apparently inspired by, or at least influenced by, Moby Dick. If I’m honest I don’t remember too many similarities between the two, although it’s been oh so long since I read the latter so who knows, maybe I’ve forgotten some important plot point. After all, as the author notes:

“I saw Linda as a mixture of Ishmael and Ahab,” says Folk, adding that she felt both her work and Melville’s were about humans trying to dominate the natural world. “Both planes and whales involve oil.”