historical fiction
Atmosphere is a story about women astronauts. It starts with a space shuttle tragedy taking place in 1984 which hints at a personal connection between one of the astronauts in space and another in ground control, and then spends 80% of the novel looking back at how all the people got to that moment.
I liked the spotlight on women in the NASA space program. I just kept thinking, why did Taylor Jenkins Reid think she was the right person to write a novel about space travel? From the author’s comments, it seems this was simply a topic that interested her and so she decided to dive in, do some research, and attempt to convince her readers to be as interested in outer space as she is. Sadly, while I did like it, this novel was not nearly as good as the other novels of Reid’s that I’ve read. There was a lot of awkwardness between the protagonist and other characters, including her family members. The forbidden lesbian love affair was a promising storyline, but the stiff behaviors, the overdone naïveté, and the way Joan kept calling her niece “Babe” bugged me a lot.
I think the author does soap opera better than historical fiction. Without the juicy gossip for which Reid is known, this novel just didn’t have a lot of wind under its sails until, finally, all the drama happened in the last 20% of the novel. The ending was exciting and gripping. It even had me crying. But, overall, this was a disappointment compared to Reid’s other novels.
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