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.