Atmosphere: A Love Story ★★★★☆

Sentimental and a little too neat, but it wins you over anyway.

This is a love story set among astronauts, and Reid leans into the astronaut milieu more than the romance genre usually allows. There's a nice bit of self-awareness about who actually gets to go to space: for all the swagger the job attracts, "a thrilling ability that seems ripe to attract cowboys" is "best done by people like her. Nerds." That's a good line, and it sets the tone for a book more interested in competence and quiet devotion than dramatic gestures.

The characters are a bit too perfect. Everyone here is admirable, articulate, and emotionally generous almost all the time, which makes the early chapters feel more like a wish fulfillment than a story with real stakes. One character puts the book's whole ethos plainly: "Happiness is so hard to come by. I don't understand why anyone would begrudge anyone else for managing to find some of it." Sweet, sincere, and a little unearned this early on, because nobody has begrudged anyone anything yet.

Where the book turns is the last quarter, when the stakes finally catch up to the sentiment. There's a passage about the stars being immovable, indifferent to whether "we can succeed or fail, get it right or get it wrong," that lands with real weight once the plot has given you a reason to need that kind of comfort. That's when the charm stops feeling like packaging and starts feeling earned.

Worth it for the ending, even if the setup takes its time getting there. I wanted a little more friction earlier. The last quarter proves Reid can write it. I just wish she'd let a bit more in sooner.

• Format: 341 pages, Kindle Edition
• Published: June 3, 2025 by Ballantine Books
• ISBN: 9780593158722 (ISBN10: 0593158725)
• ASIN: B0DKW527GX
• Language: English

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 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. 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, it all changes in an instant.

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, creating complex protagonists, and telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love—this time among the stars.

Notable Highlights

But I think it is also the relief I feel that those stars are immovable. Nothing you or I could do will ever alter them. They are so much bigger than us. And they will not change within our lifetime. We can succeed or fail, get it right or get it wrong, love and lose the ones we love, and still the Summer Triangle will point south. And in that way, I know everything will be some type of okay—as impossible as that can seem sometimes. [loc. 76]

We are so determined to learn what lies beyond our grasp that we have figured out how to ride a rocket out of the atmosphere. A thrilling ability that seems ripe to attract cowboys, but is best done by people like her. Nerds. [loc. 129]

“Happiness is so hard to come by. I don’t understand why anyone would begrudge anyone else for managing to find some of it.” [loc. 3692]