Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

352 pages

Published June 2025 by Random House Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easygoing even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, it all changes in an instant.

My Thoughts: 

That publisher's summary also calls this book "fast-paced," which I found interesting because I didn't find it fast-paced at all. It starts off with a literal bang, but then we go back in time and find out how Joan found herself sitting at CAPCOM when STS-LR9 was on its mission, which slows things down considerably. Which was not necessarily a bad thing. It gives readers time to get to know Joan, her sister, Barbara, niece Frances, and her NASA friends. But there is also a lot in this book that could easily have been trimmed out; I often felt like Reid was stuck in "tell" not "show" mode. 

Taking readers back to the beginning of the space shuttle program allows Reid a chance to not only dig into the science of that program, but the norms of that time as well. Barbara, who found herself a single mom early, spends the rest of the book trying to get to the life she expected - married woman with an easy life. Joan, on the other hand, has never had any interest in having a man in her life, absorbed as she is in science and the universe, a life that was still new for women in that time. But it's when Joan finally finds love that she really blazes a trail far different from her sister, one that might risk her career. 

I applaud Reid taking that risk in the book (although it's not the first time that risk has appeared in one of her books) and I felt like she had really done her research when it came to the space program. All of the training and things that happened on the flights felt very real. There are some really interesting (for the most part) characters in this book and I really liked "watching" the astronauts come together as a family. As the book reached the climax, I thought I knew how it would end and felt that was the right ending. At the last minute, Reid veered away from that and I'm still not sure I like the way she ended the book. 

The Woman in Suite 11 by Ruth Ware

The Woman In Suite 11 by Ruth Ware

400 pages

Published July 2025 by Gallery/Scout Press 

Publisher's Summary: 

When the invitation to attend the press opening of a luxury Swiss hotel—owned by reclusive billionaire Marcus Leidmann—arrives, it’s like the answer to a prayer. Three years after the birth of her youngest child, Lo Blacklock is ready to reestablish her journalism career, but post-pandemic travel journalism is a very different landscape from the one she left ten years ago.

The chateau on the shores of Lake Geneva is everything Lo’s ever dreamed of, and she hopes she can snag an interview with Marcus. Unfortunately, he proves to be even more difficult to pin down than his reputation suggests. When Lo gets a late-night call asking her to come to Marcus’s hotel room, she agrees despite her own misgivings. She’s greeted, however, by a woman claiming to be Marcus’s mistress, and in life-or-death jeopardy.

What follows is a thrilling cat-and-mouse pursuit across Europe, forcing Lo to ask herself just how much she’s willing to sacrifice to save this woman...and if she can even trust her?

My Thoughts: 

This is my eighth book by Ware. I found myself, from the start, wondering if it might be my last. 

It's a sequel of sorts to Ware's hit, The Woman In Cabin 10, in which Lo Blacklock finds herself locked in a cabin on a boat, certain she is going to die there. This book opens giving readers the belief that the same thing has happened to Lo again. And that's where Ware first lost me. Could this woman seriously have found herself in exactly the same position ten years later? Didn't Ware have any better story ideas than to rehash the same story? 

By the time this story finally caught up with the teaser opening chapter, I had spent too much time being frustrated with idea that this would be the same story to be very much relieved that it wasn't. 

I will say that the story picked up and I did find myself racing through it. Did I figure out all of the plot twists? No, I didn't; although to be fair to myself, that was partly because some of the plot points felt so preposterous that they never would have occurred to me. But also, yes, I did figure out some of the twists and you'll know by now that if I've figured it out ahead of the denouement, it's pretty obvious. Another problem I had with the book was that there were so many loose threads. Now you might say they were red herrings, but they didn't feel like that and they never got explained away. 

Overall, a disappointment. But let's be honest, I've like Ware enough in the past to give her another chance when her next book comes out. 

Life: It Goes On - October 6

Happy Monday! Had to wait until today to type this because I absolutely could not type yesterday. You know you're getting old when you can manage to hurt your wrist so badly while you're sleeping that it's all  but useless the next day. It's bad enough to have had that happen, but not be as productive on a weekend day as I needed to be was frustrating. 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: I finished The Wife Upstairs and started Sarah Damoff's The Bright Years. 

Watched: Football, volleyball, The Voice, and Only Murders In The Building. The usual. 

Read: I'm hoping to finish Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid tonight and then I think the next book in my giant book of library books (I have seven physical books right now!) will be Broken Country, by Clare Leslie Hall, which I just picked up today. 

Made: Biscoff blondies. If you like Biscoff butter or Biscoff cookies, you'll like these. But they are so rich! 

Enjoyed: Saturday we went to a craft fair to support Mini-him's fiancee (weirdest craft fair I've ever been to and definitely not the usual crowd you see at a craft fair but they did have drinks!), then we ate Cajun food at a place we've been meaning to go to for years, and ended up at an event where the mayor and his wife were in attendance. That in itself wouldn't have been a big deal, except that the Big Guy was in a group of four that spent about 45 minutes talking to the mayor and his wife came at sat with me for about that long. Does that mean we're in the in crowd now? 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: I have to get some dresser drawers painted in the next day or two because we'll be helping Ms. H move this weekend and she needs to have a temporary dresser while we repair her current one, which was her great-grandmother's. 

Thinking About: Usually about this time of year we're pulling the tomato plants because we've had a freeze. Not this year. In fact they're still producing, which is great except that I'm running out of ways to use them! 

Feeling: It's been grey and rainy the past couple of days and my mood on these kinds of days makes me certain I could never live in the Pacific Northwest. 

Looking forward to: Seeing Ms. H this weekend and another Shep siblings dinner. 

Question of the week: What are you reading these days? Are you deep into the spooky reads for the season? 

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

448 pages

Published May 2025 by Atria Books

Publisher's Summary: 

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise, and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes about what she’ll find. Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art.

My Thoughts: 

I've been going back and forth on this one. On the one hand, it is very much what readers expect from Backman. On the other hand, it's a very different story from his usual stories. I've seen some readers say that it's their favorite of his books. For me, it's not, which is not to say it's not a very good book that will give Backman fans much of what they want from his books. 

Like Backman's other books, My Friends deals with loss, grief, friendship, and the ways life can be hard and complicated at times. While this book has plenty of Backman's usual humor, it felt to me that it was more weighed down by life's difficulties than his other books. 

The book is told from two time periods and two points of view through most of the book. In present time, we are following Louisa who has led a really tough life, including the recent death of her only friend. Her only solace is a postcard of a famous painting, a painting she finally gets to see in person. In the past, we follow four friends, who live equally difficult lives, as they live their final summer together, the summer that resulted in that famous painting. Their only real joy is the time they spend together, time that ends each evening with the word "Tomorrow," a promise to each other. 

Louisa's life becomes intertwined with one of the friends and as the two of them travel across the country, the friend tells Louisa the story of that summer. Finally we come to the town the friends grew up in and Louisa is given the chance to restart her life, with new friends and opportunities she never would have had without that postcard.