Atmosphere
A Love Story
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4.4 • 121 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
*AN INSTANT #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER*
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six comes an epic new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle program, about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.
Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. She is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA's space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns 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, easygoing even when the stakes are high; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald, navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer who can fix any engine and fly any plane.
As they become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds 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: telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love–this time among the stars.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reid's transportive latest (after Carrie Soto Is Back) revolves around a forbidden love between two female astronauts in the 1980s. In 1984, a botched satellite deployment by the Navigator space shuttle kills several members of the crew. As the disaster unfolds, capsule communicator Joan Goodwin desperately tries to advise surviving engineer Vanessa Ford from Houston's Johnson Space Center. The narrative then rewinds seven years, to when Joan, a "Goody Two-shoes" astronomer at Rice University, feels a "pull deep down in the layers of her skin" upon learning that NASA is recruiting women for its astronaut corps. While training as a mission specialist, she meets tall, curly-haired Vanessa, an aeronautical engineer who longs to pilot the space shuttle. The two women are drawn to each other and begin a romance, which they keep secret due to NASA's prohibition against "sexual deviation." Their reticence makes the ill-fated 1984 flight even more poignant as Reid keeps the reader in suspense about what happens to Vanessa. Along the way, Reid makes palpable the astronauts' passion for their work and captures in vibrnt detail the era's high-stakes and fast-paced shuttle program. The author's fans will find much to enjoy.
Customer Reviews
my first book
beautiful😭
Amazing book
What a great read! Holds you from start to finish!