Atmosphere Book Review

Hello everyone and welcome back to the blog! Taylor Jenkins Reid is slowly becoming one of my new auto-buy authors. As soon as I read the premise of this book I knew it was going to be so good. So, let's get into it!

In the novel Atmosphere, it’s the 1980s, and we follow Joan Goodwin who has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. NASA is now starting to let women into their space programs. Out of thousands of applicants Joan, along with a handful of others, are finally closer than ever to achieving their dreams of going into space. At the Houston Johnson Space Center, Joan begins training. We follow her journey through the training camp, we see her making friends, falling in love, and handling the idea of women making history. Along with typical family struggles as well. Atmosphere is a beautiful story of love, loss, determination, and learning what it means to be the person you want to be.

This book altered my brain chemistry. I truly cannot explain how much I loved reading this. I have slowly started to make my way through Taylor Jenkins Reid’s books, and I’m so happy to have gotten to this one so soon. It’s her newest release and honestly my favorite book by her that I’ve read so far.

The writing and incorporation of themes such as family struggles, finding love in the most unlikely of places, to forbidden romance, and having what is takes to achieve your dreams is incredible. I knew as soon as I read the synopsis months ago that this book was going to be so good, and I was right.

Reid has this amazing way of immersing the reader into this world of characters she built. I love being set in a monumental decade era. I can’t imagine the amount of research she has to do for each book but especially this one. If you’re someone who doesn’t usually read contemporary fiction, I still highly recommend checking this book out. It’s a little over 300 pages, there are short chapters/breaks, and the first chapter starts out with a bang. From the very first page you are pulled in. Throughout the book we jump back and forth from the very first scene to a few years before until eventually we catch up.

I loved Joan as a character. She was so real and determined; she was chasing her dreams no matter what anyone had said to her. She was such a fierce character, along with Vanessa. Vanessa was really the “fuck what they think” type of person. She was so courageous.

I absolutely hated Joan’s sister, Barbara. She was so annoying and honestly really dumb. Which I know means she was a well written character—to elicit this type of emotion from a reader, but God, I couldn’t stand her and what she did to her daughter, Franny. No spoilers though.

Overall, I highly recommend checking this book out, as well as Reid’s other books. I gave this 5/5 stars.

Alright folks, that is all I have for this week! Come back next Wednesday for another blog post. As always, thank you for reading :)