Thank you to NetGalley, Random House Publishing Group, and Ballantine Books for an advanced copy of this book.

Taylor Jenkins Reid does an excellent job of creating relatable characters and immersing them in a world of which few people have a depth of knowledge. Where this book succeeds is in conveying a love of curiosity and discovery, and the desire to learn more about the world around us. The storyline involving the main character, her sister, and her niece was the one that I found the most compelling. I loved learning more about NASA and some behind-the-scenes information about the space program.

Side-note - I do not feel that the promotional information for this book is accurate. I was looking forward to a story focused on a woman and her journey through her career in the space program - not a romance. The two vague mentions of "love" in the advertising blurbs did not make it clear that the primary focus of the entire book was a love story.

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid was incredible — emotional, immersive, and totally pulled me in from page one. I was hooked the entire time. Huge thank you to NetGalley for the ARC — this one hits all the feels in the best way. Can’t recommend it enough!









!

TJR has once again set the standard for what a good novel should be ….this novel was utter perfection…my favorite book I’ve read so far this year …No notes whatsoever

Taylor Jenkins Reid knows how to write a book that feels like golden hour on your favorite porch: glowing, effortless, and just sentimental enough to leave you full-hearted. Atmosphere is no exception.
Set in the 1980s, this is a love story for women, and about women, who dare to push back against the identities handed to them and explore what more there might be in this world and far beyond it. I appreciated the sprinkles of science of astronomy, physics, and space travel in a way that feels both accessible and deeply researched. It’s a novel that respects your intellect while pulling at your heart.
As always, Reid’s characters are complex, relatable, and the kind you would (mostly) want to be friends with. Atmosphere is equal parts beach read and literary fiction and I found myself reading it while brushing my teeth, sneaking chapters between tasks, and turning “one more page” into “one more chapter.” It’s a book that hands you a pair of sunglasses and says, Welcome to summer. Go explore.
So go ahead. Dive in. You’ve earned it.

Nice balance of a story line and the science. I disagree with TJR that this was her best book to date, but still enjoyable

Taylor Jenkins Reid has a recipe for a perfect page-turning “beach read”: compelling and complex characters, a strong sense of place, ticking timers, dual timelines, and chapter-ending cliff-hangers that keep the plot moving. Her latest, Atmosphere: A Love Story, follows women astronauts in the 1980s space shuttle program: astrophysics professor Joan Goodwin and pilot Vanessa Ford. The book opens with an on-flight disaster in a 1984 shuttle launch and cuts back and forth between their race-against-the clock to get home and their journey through the space program that brought them to this moment. If the shuttle catastrophe in the opening scene isn’t enough to keep the pages turning, there’s also some major family drama, specifically with Joan’s volatile sister Barbara and Barbara’s daughter, Frances. Joan’s beloved niece is just as intelligent and compassionate as her aunt, and as a cool auntie myself, I loved seeing this special relationship portrayed on the page. Whether readers think the “love story” of the title refers to Joan’s scientific love story with space, Joan’s familial love story with Frances, or Joan’s romantic love story with her partner, they’ll find the emotional core of the story equally balanced with the high-octane action.

I enjoyed Atmosphere, but wanted more, so I picked up two books to explore the historical background of this fictional story: The Six: The Extraordinary Story of the Grit and Daring of America’s First Women Astronauts, by Lauren Grush and Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, by Adam Higginbotham.

In The Six, journalist Lauren Grush offers an extended profile of the first six women astronauts that NASA admitted into the astronaut corps in 1978: Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Kathryn Sullivan, Anna Fisher, Rhea Seddon, and Shannon Lucid. Grush focuses on the lives of these women– their triumphs and tragedies, professional and personal. These intertwined stories are at times celebratory and inspirational, and at other times tragic and enraging. Grush elucidates the sexism these women faced in their work: navigating the unending tide of crude jokes, making do the best they could with equipment made for men, denying themselves any maternity leave so as not to lose mission time. NASA designed a make-up kit for Sally Ride’s first flight to space (which she refused, because seriously who has the time?!), and yet they never thought to design women’s space suits with actual women’s measurements.

But I think Higginbotham reveals the most devastating instance of sexism from that season at NASA. After the explosion, NASA offered Judy Resnik’s family a smaller settlement than all the other casualties. Since Judy was unmarried and child-free, there weren’t dependents who would need financial support, but offering a lower settlement communicates: “single, child-free women are less valuable than everyone else.” After a lawsuit, NASA was compelled to offer an equitable settlement to the surviving Resnik family, but this budget-induced shortcut might be the worst of all of them.

Throughout Challenger, journalist Adam Higginbotham puts one of NASA’s darkest moments under a microscope and offers a nuanced post-mortem of the Challenger explosion (January 28, 1986) and death of the seven-person crew. While he eviscerates the systems that led to many fatal compromises, he also humanizes the large cast of characters orbiting the explosion, “demonstrating an unflinching ability to pierce through politics, power and bureaucracies with laser-sharp focus” (Alice Clary, Bookpage). After getting acclimated to the lingo and cast of characters, this book genuinely reads like a thriller, and The New York Times named it one of the most notable books of 2024.

Pick up this “book flight” about space flights for summer reading!

TJR once again delivers a poignant read that will pull at your heart strings and sit with you long after you turn the final page, this time taking up into the stars.

THANK YOU to Random House, Ballantine Books, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an arc in exchange for an honest review. Taylor Jenkins Reid is one of my absolute favorite authors of our time and it was such a thrill to get a head start on this one!

Reid’s ability to craft a world, people, and relationships so diligently that the reader becomes absolutely immersed in the world never ceases to amaze me. I still have a hard time believing that Daisy Jones and Evelyn Hugo weren’t real people and we’ve got another beauty to add to the list!

Joan has worked in physics all her life and is now in an astronaut training program with NASA! Her reverence for the sky above is inspiringly well-executed, as is each friendship that finds its way into Joan’s life. Joan has a strained relationship with her sister, but a magical connection with her niece. At the beginning of this whirlwind of a novel, Joan is CAPCOM for one of the first shuttles that ever included women actually being sent into space (after making it there herself, might I add) when some things go wrong. Joan is personally connected to every astronaut on that shuttle and lives are being lost while she’s connected via headset. Her job is to get them through this, to get them home, and most importantly to remain calm. Of course, when it starts to look its worst, Taylor Jenkins Reid forces us to jump backwards in time and fall in love with every aspect before we get to see its ultimate untimely demise. I don’t want to say too much about this one because I think you just gotta jump in and read it, but I will say that it was very difficult not to get my hopes up, even though I already knew quite a bit about how things were going to turn out.
Read it! Even if you don’t like space books (because I usually don’t), read it!

I LOVE WOMEN

TJR is very good at crafting storylines and characters in which make a reader deeply care for. Atmosphere is just another example of her feat. It is a different avenue for TJR with focusing on science and space but it works and is a nice change from previous works. This will definitely be a great read for fans of TJR and for readers who enjoy an emotional read with found family intertwined.

Another amazing historical fiction novel from Taylor Jenkins Reid! Part romance part drama Reid weaves these characters stories together masterfully. Lesbians, space, and a group of badass astronauts make this book a must read.

4.5 stars rounded up

Taylor Jenkins Reid does it again! I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid, and Sally Ride was a woman that I looked up to. So this felt nostalgic and one of the things that TJR does so well is making these stories almost feel like non-fiction. These characters feel REAL. And I love the sapphic relationship being highlighted in this story!

TJR does it again. Filled with romance, suspense, family drama, and feminism. I could not put this book down and did not want it to be over.

Thank you to NetGalley, author Taylor Jenkins Reid, and Random House Publishing Group: Ballentine for providing me with a free ARC in exchange for my honest opinion!

WOW!! Taylor Jenkins Reid is a hit-or-miss author for me, but luckily, this was a big hit! I think her stories really shine when focusing on one main character and truly deep diving into their experience and feelings (vs the multiple perspectives found in Daisy Jones or Malibu Rising). I was immediately drawn in from page one, and the pacing works SO well. The tension and suspense of a space mission happening alongside the flashbacks of getting to know the characters made it to where I couldn't put the book down. It is clear that TJR did a lot of research into NASA and the space program of the 1980s, and this made the story read authentic. Joan is a complex character to focus on, and I appreciated getting to fully see her quirks and passion for space. And of course, I love a sapphic relationship! I do think that for most of this book, the relationship was a bit more tame/palatable for TJR's (mostly) straight audience, which detracted from the story some for me. By "tame", I don't mean that I was looking for "spicy" scenes, but more just true ins and outs of a lesbian relationship (especially during such a fraught time during the 80s) and a little more candor besides some "unspoken" things off the page. However, I do think the ending was an absolute game-changer for my enjoyment of the book. The ending so perfectly wrapped up the story that had unfolded and was masterfully written, from pacing to dialogue to emotion to sentiment. I also thoroughly enjoyed the relationship between Frances and Joan, as that added so much depth to the book. The complex family dynamics between Joan and Barb, which then led to impact her relationships with Frances and Vanessa, were important to the story being told, and I think helped the story to shine when it focused on developing Joan. There were some interesting moments reflecting on religion that I wasn't expecting, and I enjoyed being pleasantly surprised by multiple aspects of this story. I will definitely be thinking about this book for a while to come, which I wasn't expecting, and can't wait to discuss this lovely story with my book club friends!

The reels are all true -- this is so worth the hype! I'm still feeling all the feels...

I don't say this lightly, but this book should be at the top of every realistic and historical fiction reader's TBR. At the core of the story is the character growth of Joan, our astronomer narrator, and the relationships that ultimately make up her "atmosphere" -- the love of her life, Vanessa; her niece, Frances; her sister, Barbara; and fellow astronauts Griff, Lydia, Hank, Steve, and Donna -- during the introduction of women to NASA's space program in the early 1980's. And yes, it pains me to admit that my childhood is now considered historical fiction. Sigh.

Joan and Vanessa's love for one another are paramount to the plot, but what makes this book so beautiful is how author Taylor Jenkins Reid weaves this realistic romance with the difficulties of being a member of the LGBTQ community during the 1980's, the struggles women faced in order to be taken seriously in roles traditionally held by men, the hard work and pressure of astronaut training, the complexities of family and traditional gender roles, and the lives of the unique characters she uses to tell each aspect of the story. I found myself tearing up on more than one occasion, and the first chapter and last chapter still have a chokehold on me. I was quickly invested in each of these characters and I would love to be best friends with pretty much all of them. I was hooked through every chapter and fascinated by every NASA training scene. My only issue: I absolutely needed one more chapter. Give us an epilogue, TJR!

This book was so worth the hype and I totally understand now why I saw no less than 4 reels with reviewers literally crying when talking about this book. I honestly didn't want it to end. I'm still feeling all the feels, and I'm now what I anticipate to be a several-day-long book hangover.

**Thank you, NetGalley and publishers, for a DRC in exchange for an honest review.**

I chose this book based on the setting-a disaster on the space shuttle. I love books with science woven in and after reading Atmosphere, I felt this book was not at all what I was expecting. The romance was believable and beautiful, but the author spent so much time describing the character's feelings, I found myself skipping ahead in many places. This is definitely more of a love story than a story about astronauts in space. If that is what you are looking for, then you will enjoy this book. It just wasn't for me.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Many will come for the love story, but I stayed for Joan's relationship with her niece Frances. Got me smack dab in my mama heart! TJR obviously does it again - women in 80s NASA space program, love, career, family conflict - complete with a tearjerker ending. Each character is rich and at times she makes you love them and hate them. So much going on, so much to discuss, a good book club pick!

A true love story in every sense of the word - but drama, education and a true love of life!

This book has so many levels - so many great ideas, truths and feels! A love story to life and living it the way you were meant to!

Atmosphere is a novel about a fictional female astronaut who becomes one of the first American women in space during the 1980s.

Astronomer and astrophysics professor Joan Goodwin takes a gamble and applies for a position with NASA. They are actively recruiting women, and this is Joan’s chance to fulfill her dream of going to space. She makes the cut and joins a team of men and women preparing to leave Earth aboard a space shuttle. Among this ambitious crew, Joan finds acceptance, a sense of family, and even romantic love for the first time in her life. But even with the most capable team, accidents can happen. Joan must face unimaginable pressure and painful losses.

This is a heart-wrenching novel about discovering love in unexpected places and the possibility of losing it. It’s also about ambition and the smart, capable women who broke through the glass ceiling at NASA. Joan’s role in her niece Frances’s life goes far beyond what anyone would expect from an aunt. Her love is constant, her support unwavering, and she shows up for her over and over despite her career at NASA.

I found Joan to be a compelling character unlike anyone I’ve read before. Even Lydia, a fellow astronaut who always seems to say the wrong thing, was hard to dislike. The tense chapters about the Navigator flight and the brave woman trying to bring it home left me emotional and teary-eyed.

Overall, this is a fascinating story about space, love, family, and courage. I really enjoyed it.

I know nothing about space, and I was admittedly a little nervous that I'd feel too out of my depth to appreciate this story. But then I thought "this is TJR -- don't be silly! You know nothing about tennis and loved Carrie Soto!" and BOY AM I GLAD I TOOK A CHANCE.

As always, the character development is impeccable. How TJR manages to take already strong female main characters and build them up to be even better versions of themselves throughout a novel is incredible. I laughed, I cried, I suddenly developed an interest in space????

Another amazing book, and I'm not at all surprised by that.

Loved! TJR remains unmatched. A queer space love story in the 1970s/1980s is just the absolute best. This is a perfect summer read.