Joan Goodwin has spent her life loving the stars from the ground. Suddenly, Joan’s life ignites with possibility when NASA is looking for women scientists to join the space shuttle program. She burns to be one of the few to actually go to space.

Atmosphere follows Joan as she chases this dream, and Taylor Jenkins Reid has a gift for pulling you into the momentum of it all. The pace is relentless in the best way, and the characters practically glow off the page. You’re swept along by the force of what’s happening, caught up in the richness of who these people are.

What really works for me here is how Reid builds her characters as the story unfolds. They don’t feel fixed or flat. You watch them awaken to things, shift in real time, grow into themselves. That kind of character work takes skill, and she nails it.

But here’s where I hit a wall as I enjoyed the reading experience. The book carries a lot of narrative weight. Multiple characters, multiple threads, so many moving pieces all asking for your attention at once. And with everything demanding space on the page, I found myself struggling to actually land anywhere. I’d get pulled toward one character’s perspective, then suddenly the focus would shift, and I didn’t have enough space to understand what was happening in the first place.

That’s when the character connections started feeling thin to me. Attachments between people would suddenly appear like they were always there, waiting for me to catch up. Except my brain hadn’t been given proper time to understand why these people mattered to each other. Once I lost that foundation, everything else started crumbling. If I didn’t understand in the relationships’ connection, I couldn’t feel the weight of what happened to them. And that rippled through the rest of the book.

It’s the kind of thing that might hit differently depending on who you are as a reader. Some people probably soaked up all those layers without blinking. For me, it felt like I was being handed information when what I really wanted was intimacy: fewer threads, more depth in each one.

Atmosphere is ambitious and beautifully written. It just didn’t quite land the emotional punch I needed to stay fully invested.

My Favorite Bits

• “Joan, you live in a world where time is on your side. But I don’t live in that world, Joan. You live there alone.”

• “I mean, I don’t confuse my respect for you with patience.”

• Astronomy was history. Because space was time. And that was the thing she loved most about the universe itself. (..) So when you look out at the sky, the farther you can see, the further back you are looking in time. The space between you and the star is time.

• To look up at the nighttime sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars. It is to witness time unfolding.

• Being human was such a lonely endeavour. We alone have consciousness; we are the only intelligent life force that we know of in the galaxy. We have no one but one another. Joan was always moved by the fact that everything—all matter on Earth and beyond, up past the atmosphere, going as far as the edges of the universe, as it expands farther and farther away from us—is made from the same elements. We are made of the same things as the stars and the planets. Remembering that connection brought Joan comfort. It also bought her some sense of responsibility.
• Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.

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Author: Taylor Reid Jenkins
Publication date: 3 June 2025
Number of pages: 337 pages

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