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.
Is there a popular fiction writer alive who conveys falling in love better than Taylor Jenkins Reid? ... It would all feel a little passé if it wasn’t so well told. Taylor Jenkins Reid is great at creating characters that while they fit a stereotype, exist on the page as comfortably (or awkwardly) as readers imagine they would in real life.
You might think that a book as trite and self-aggrandising as this one would appeal to someone like me. Perhaps I just wasn’t in a good mood. Or perhaps it’s not a very good book ... You can fly through the short, sunscreen-greased chapters in an afternoon. But that’s not good enough for a behemoth like Reid, whose previous books I have enjoyed. A beach read (which given the release date is clearly what the publishers are gunning for) should slip down like a tangy, frosted cocktail. Whereas Atmosphere is like eating a bowl of broccoli—in space ... Part of the problem is Joan, a protagonist so maniacally accomplished...and alienatingly nice that you sympathise with her girlfriend for running off to space. Then there’s the progressive political messaging, which is about as subtle as a piece of moon rock to the skull ... So perhaps we could have survived without the Nike-style motivational slogans...and tortured metaphors ... When I interviewed Reid in 2022, she told me that “fun is not antithetical to substance.” In Atmosphere, just to make sure, she gives us neither.
Jenkins Reid’s use of modern phrases is jarring in this 1980s-set story of two women joining Nasa ... What was once an experiment has become the done thing: 1. opening teaser as close to the end as possible, 2. cut to much earlier in the story, 3. interweave the pursuit of both threads until they join definitively at the end. Atmosphere follows this formula ... She’s not a stylist, and that’s fine ... Her sentences convey character, setting and plot without drawing attention to themselves. Unhindered by the road bump of experimental prose, a casual reader might breeze past the insight often packed into short strings of words ... The humour is gentle rather than uproarious ... The novel’s feminism operates at a similar emotional temperature: friendly, with a tendency to flatter the 21st-century reader’s existing sensibilities, rather than to prompt any startling self-interrogation. ... When the language does embody the context, it’s thrilling ... I had only the vaguest clue what was happening and I loved it; the texture and energy mattered more than the exact meaning ... This book is an imperfect addition, but one that floats.
