Sleek and darkly comical ... Folk is a dryly funny writer, with the melancholic wit and whimsy of Miranda July ... Folk’s deft navigation between sardonic optimism and buoyant fatalism is perfectly calibrated to the utter strangeness of being alive today, when the closeness of our private devices pushes us farther from each other and getting swept up in the machinery can feel safer than the turbulence of true attachment.
The results are just as bizarre, witty and poignant as her fans could hope ... Nothing...comes close to the libidinous creativity of Sky Daddy ... As unusual as Linda seems at the opening of Sky Daddy, by the end, her meditation on desire and friendship feels surprisingly touching.
If some of the immediacy of the stories is lost in Sky Daddy, Folk ramps up other aspects of her writing, like its wry humor ... A protagonist like Linda could easily be portrayed as cartoonish, but her self-effacing charm and kindness turns out to show Folk’s skill with characterization as well ... There’s an amusing, if familiar, tech workplace novel laced throughout ... Folk avoids a pat conclusion ... Folk’s male characters are not necessarily one-note or diminutive—though they can be—but one does wonder what else we might see in her thought experiments if these women were afforded more attentive partners on occasion ... By one measure, it’s a somewhat safe, even quaint, place to land… By another, it’s a far more dangerous ending, that of the Thelma and Louise variety, with two women embracing their shared fate and refusing all else.
Daredevil ... 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.
Blistering ... The allure of an inanimate object has seldom been so touchingly rendered than in Folk’s wry, tender, and sweetly odd narrative. It’s an unforgettable ode to the pursuit of desire.
