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.
Reid masterfully ratchets up the tension in Atmosphere’s breathtaking final chapter, where the physical and emotional stakes couldn’t be higher, and where Earth, rather than space, may turn out to be the final frontier.
Even with the high-stakes action, the touching and surprising love story is the emotional heart of the book. A heart-pounding race against the clock combined with a love story adds up to a novel that’s impossible to put down.
