Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere Is Pure Literary Magic – Here’s Why

Where emotion meets elegance, Atmosphere proves Reid’s storytelling is unmatched.

Synopsis

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six comes an epic new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s Space Shuttle program about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.

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 easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted 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, everything changes in an instant.

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.

Audiobook review

6 stars

Once again Taylor Jenkins Read did it! And it’s no small feat because when I realized the story would have some very stressful moment in a space shuttle, I wanted to stop reading!
I have fear of flying and am sick with fear just thinking of someone going into space and seeing all these books darkness! Knowing that outside the shuttle I would either die instantly without my spacesuit or be lost forever! No Sir! Thank you very much!

And yet…and yet I ended up loving it and crying like a baby too!
She had me soaring above my fears, swept away by these characters and the length they would go to realize their dreams.

But what makes that book so great?

First the characters and their back stories.
Joan having never found love, never been attracted to another human being but with a heart of gold!
Amazingly smart, SHE will take care of her niece Frances when her younger sister falls pregnant at eighteen. SHE will take the baby to see the stars, after a long work day so that her sister has « me »time.
SHE will never miss a play, a birthday or anything while frankly, her sister was childish and egotistical.
My heart broke for poor Frances always a burden for her mother.

It also is Jones who will help Lydia, their fellow Ascan (Astronaut Candidate) whose personality was really hard to love!

And if someone had romantic feelings for her, she would always hurt for them and try to explain very sweetly why she didn’t want them back the same way.

Whip smart , courageous, determined to become an astronaut, facing her fears and being the kindest person, what was not to love in Joan right?

Every fellow astronaut candidate was also extremely well fleshed out ! Some were quite despicable, making sexist jokes but others were adorable like Griffin or mysterious like Vanessa.

Second: the historical context and all the research TJR must have done! In 1980, women will just begin to be considered as acceptable in a space mission. All the preparation that had to be done from parachuting at sea and climbing on a boat to studying physics to flying military planes. That was fascinating and brilliant.

And of course: the relationship and romance. I loved how TJR wrote that. How she had Jones discover who she truly was, who she found attractive. How feelings blossomed when they never asked for them.

This is once more Taylor Jenkins Read at her finest!

Thanks for reading.

Sophie