Atmosphere

Author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 2025
Pages: 352
Rating: Recommend

Synopsis: 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, Francis. 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 pilots Hank Redmond and 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.

Review: I chose this novel because it's Taylor Jenkins Reid, but I have to admit, space does not excite me. That said, tennis never excited me either, but Carrie Soto is Back was excellent. This was somewhere between The Seven Husband of Evelyn Hugo and Carrie Soto is Back. I liked it, but didn't love it.

Other Taylor Jenkins Reid Novels
Carrie Soto is Back
Daisy Jones and The Six
Malibu Rising
Maybe in Another Life
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo