Starred review from February 15, 2025
A surreal tale of one woman's epic search for a love that can never be returned. When Linda isn't working as a content moderator at the tech company Acuity or passing time in the windowless bedroom she rents from a local family, she travels the skies in her beloved airplanes. Linda doesn't simply love planes--she'sin love with them, referring to each "fine gentleman" fondly by his tail number and admiring not only the planes' "slender ankles" and "intelligent windscreen[s]" but also their individual personalities. Linda flies both to experience sexual pleasure and to search for what she sees as her ultimate fulfillment: "for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate mid-flight and, overcome with passion...hurtl[e] us to earth" in a crash. Despite her commitment to her goal, Linda is keenly aware that she's not normal, and works to shield her deepest desires from the people around her. Her life is an isolated one until she's befriended by Karina Carvalho, a colleague at Acuity. As Linda's dream of communion with an airplane remains elusive, she finds herself increasingly wrapped up in her friendship with Karina and experimenting with relationships with human men. Soon, the pressure of maintaining her lives in the air and on the ground will become too difficult, forcing her to choose which she values most. Folk--following up her memorably weird and innovative story collection, Out There (2022)--displays a masterful command over Linda's mindset and thought processes in her first-person narration. Though Linda is deeply deluded, she's self-aware about the unusual nature of her emotions without ever questioning them. And her life is otherwise mundane, characterized by relatable stresses about work, friendship, and the struggle to fit in. This strange combination of tones is often hilarious, but never at Linda's expense. An utterly confident and endearing portrait of a woman unlike anyone readers have met before.
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March 1, 2025
Folk announces the wildly disconcerting inspiration and premise for her daredevil debut novel, which follows her short-story collection, Out There (2022), with the opening line, "Call me Linda." Linda then explains that her destiny is "for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate midflight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky." A bold and unnerving variation on the whale-crazed captain in Moby Dick, she is on the hunt for her true love among the airplanes she swoons over on her frequent flights. Living sparely near San Francisco in a bleak, windowless space and working as a content moderator for a video-sharing platform, Linda is utterly consumed by her erotic obsession. She readily accepts her coworker Karina's invitation to a vision board brunch, hoping to finally manifest her fiery and fatal dream. But as she grows close to Karina and entangled with a higher-up at the firm, everything becomes complicated and fraught. Linda is a magnetic monomaniac, and her predilection and predicaments are hilarious and heart-wrenching. With gravity-defying imagination, astute psychological and metaphysical insights, and storytelling prowess, Folk has forged a provocative, unforgettable tale.
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