Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Published: June 3, 2025
Format: Hardcover
Length: 352 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Characters: Joan Goodwin and Vanessa Ford
POV: dual, 3rd person

🇨 🇴 🇳 🇹 🇪 🇳 🇹

꧁•⊹٭ sapphic romance ༊*·˚. character driven ༊*·˚. astronomy ༊*·˚. ༊*·˚. queer awakening ༊*·˚. friends to lovers ༊*·˚. workplace ༊*·˚. astronauts ༊*·˚. slow burn ٭⊹•꧂

𝓡𝓮𝓿𝓲𝓮𝔀 :

This book started off slow. There was so much space science talking in the beginning that it took a bit for the story to really kick in for me. But once it did, I was super invested. The last third part was intensely compelling, raw, and SO beautiful. The ending was rather abruptly though, it left me wanting an epilogue to give me more closure. However, this author has a way of bringing out deep emotions in me, I should never doubt her, everything TJR touches is gold. 4.5 stars rounded up to 5. Because any book that can make me cry deserves all the stars.

“I would give you anything if it wouldn’t cost us everything.”

“Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway.”

“Being human was such a lonely endeavor.”

“Just the act of falling in love was to agree to a broke heart.”

“Bravery, Joan suspected, is almost always a lie. Courage is all we have.”

“I would go so far as to say that as human beings, we are less of a who and more of a when.”

“The incurable problem with life was that nothing was ever in balance.”

BLURB:

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.

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