I must like stories about astronauts and space travel more than I thought, because I ended up enjoying Atmosphere considering my lackluster feelings towards Taylor Jenkins Reid.

If you are wondering how I ended up reading another novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid despite my meh feelings towards The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, it is because it was on sale for ten dollars at Indigo and I am a compulsive spender when it comes to books. Atmosphere made me feel nostalgic for the earlier seasons of the Apple TV show For All Mankind that focused on the space race of the 1960s through to the 1980s and astronaut training.

Atmosphere is set in the late 1970s and the early 1980s and is about Joan Goodwin, a professor of physics and astronomy who applies for a job at NASA to join the space shuttle program. She is one of few selected from thousands of applicants to train at the Johnson Space Center to one day go into space.

The novel is framed around a catastrophic event that occurs on December 29, 1984, aboard the shuttle Navigator that is orbiting the planet. Joan is CAPCOM for the team aboard Navigator and must help guide them back to Earth in one piece, if possible. It is a tense and emotional situation because the team aboard Navigator are also Joan’s friends. The novel alternate between the events on Navigator and Joan’s life starting from her getting the job at NASA, training to become an astronaut, and her relationships with the other astronauts, in particular Vanessa Ford, who Joan falls in love with and who might end up dying aboard Navigator.

The details about Joan’s training as an astronaut and about the operation of the NASA space shuttle program is what really sells this novel. The rest of the story unfortunately feels uninspired. Joan’s relationship with Vanessa must be kept a secret because it’s the 1980s and homosexuality was career suicide at NASA, but their relationship would have been more interesting to me if it had not felt so overwrought by having Vanessa aboard Navigator. The situation was suspenseful enough as it was without the contrivance of Joan’s lover being on the shuttle. There is also a subplot with Joan’s niece that was unexpected in its importance to the story, but obvious in its conclusion because Joan’s sister is a blatantly selfish and terrible mother.

So I did enjoy reading Atmosphere, but it hasn’t magically changed my opinion on Taylor Jenkins Reid’s writing and inspired me to go back and read her entire bibliography. I might read future novels of hers, though, depending on the subject. I recommend reading Atmosphere if you find the idea of space exploration to be interesting and want to experience it without actually having to do it.