June 2025

From the time I was a young girl, I loved the space program. It was not just what happened in the skies that intrigued me, but also what transpired at Mission Control. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s ATMOSPHERE gave me a big dose of both.

Joan Goodwin has been looking at the stars since she was a child. She is working as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University when she finds out that they are accepting female scientists at NASA’s space shuttle program. She applies and is part of the team that begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center during the summer of 1980. In these early days, the trainees are learning each other’s strong points and what they need to think about as space travelers.

During this time, Joan also begins to understand herself better --- and she finds an attraction to one of the other candidates, Vanessa Ford, who arrived in Houston with background as an aeronautical engineer and a great tech sense. The two build a relationship together, one that they keep from those in the program lest it hurt their opportunities. They already are proving themselves as female astronauts.

Each gets time in space with radically different outcomes. The suspense that builds in the final pages in 1984 is so well done. You feel like you are in the space center listening in. All I can say is that the ending is brilliant!

Sidenote here: The name of the mission at the end of the book is called STS-LR9. LR are the initials of Taylor’s daughter, and she is nine. I love little Easter eggs like that. Also, Taylor made sure that none of the actual space history was overwritten in her story. So, for example, Sally Ride is still the first American woman in space, not one of her characters.

Taylor wrote that she hopes ATMOSPHERE will have more people looking up at the heavens and at the stars. I found myself wondering where our telescope is.