Review by Annabel
This is only the second book by TJR that I’ve read, Daisy Jones & the Six being the first. While Daisy is unique in style, being written as documentary interviews, her latest, Atmosphere, has a more conventional narrative structure.
Joan always dreamed of going to the stars, single-mindedly becoming an astrophysics professor and then applying to NASA, and to her immense joy, being accepted onto the astronaut training programme. Her sister Barbara is more than underwhelmed by this, as it means that Aunty Joanie isn’t going to be available to be surrogate mum to her young daughter Frances as much, and she won’t cope.
Although Joan loves Franny more than anything else, her job will come first though. She is utterly driven by it, eschewing relationships so she can concentrate fully on the job. The trainee astronauts for the Space Shuttle are a varied bunch – her crew has a Top Gun pilot in Hank, mission specialists John Griffin and Lydia, the latter being brilliant and driven too; plus the friendly Donna and the enigmatic Vanessa, an engineer. Joan ends up being in the first crew from this cadre to go up into space, but when she returns she decides she’s fulfilled that dream and can be of most use in the launch centre where she makes a calm and supportive ‘Capcom’.
It’s this later role she’s performing as the novel actually begins in 1984, where a crew of Hank, Lydia, Vanessa and John are in space, and as the latter two are about to undertake a space walk, they need to loosen some latches so a satellite can deploy.
She [Vanessa] lets go of the ship and moves through the hatch, to take her first step into space. Her legs feel steady as she wades into the darkness. Her eyes widen at the intensity of it, a void unlike anything she’s ever seen.
She looks up, past the payload bay doors, to see Earth in the distance. Clouds streak across the deserts of North Africa. For a moment, Vanessa stops and looks at the Indian Ocean.
Job done, they return to the airlock, and John suggests they watch the satellite deploy with the door still open. You just know it’s going to go wrong. One of the charges holding the satellite goes off in the wrong direction sending debris – a piece hits Griff piercing his suit – a hand over the hole will keep him alive until Vanessa can get him inside. By now all the alarms are going off, there’s been another hit somewhere. Obviously, the mission is aborted, it’s all about getting them home alive, others were injured too. Trajectories for return are being plotted. They’re all wired up to sensors, so Joan can tell those still alive, including Vanessa, what the score is.
Reid will return to the stricken shuttle later and we’ll find out what happens at the other end of the novel. In between we have the backstory of the trainee astronauts, we have Joan and Barbara’s rocky sibling relationship, with poor young Frances stuck in the middle, but we also have a romance. Not for nothing is the subtitle of this novel ‘A Love Story’.
Joan had thought that the fact she had never felt anything for the men she dated was because she was so driven by her job, but TJR very subtly engineers a slowburn different kind of romance that builds up over the first two thirds of the novel. You can read between the lines to work out who it’ll be with, it’s obvious really, and the author really makes you care and yes, I cried at the climax of the story.
TJR has done her research well into the shuttle programme, and it all feels very real. The restaurants/bars like the real Frenchies and the Outpost Tavern where the astronauts go to let off steam are truly portrayed, all the period details of the early 1980s are on point. TJR also does well on how she gets the technical info over to her readers – obviously much can be communicated as they train, so that we learn enough but aren’t overwhelmed by it. All this provides a fantastic framework for the story of all the relationships and Joan’s central voyage of self-discovery, pitted against her sister’s penchant for unsuitable men and neglecting Frances. Atmosphere may be unashamedly commercial but it is a great page-turner.
Annabel is co-founder of Shiny, and one of its editors.
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere (Penguin, 2026). 978-1804941430, 352pp., paperback.
BUY at Waterstones via our affiliate link.
