Can't Wait Wednesday : Atmosphere

Can't-Wait Wednesday is hosted by Tressa at Wishful Endings and gives us a chance to highlight books we are patiently waiting to fill up our TBRs with.

ATMOSPHERE BY TAYLOR JENKINS REID

pub date: June 3, 2025

I was blown away by Taylor Jenkins Reid's Daisy Jones. I loved the format that she wrote it in, as if you were reading an interview. Maybe it hit as brilliant because at the time I was still working in the music business, interviewing bands, so it resonated with me. She isn't an auto buy, there have been books by her I didn't necessarily love, but a few I have liked, for instance I really enjoyed Malibu Rising, but again, I related to it in some way having grown up in California around the surfing culture. I also love how she had managed to weave Mick Riva into so many of her books. He made an appearance in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo as one of her husbands and then again in Malibu Rising as the children's absent father. He also has small appearances, ones you might miss in Daisy Jones and Carrie Soto is back. I can't wait to see if she somehow places him in Atmosphere. 

Also reading the summary of this book kind of gives me Challenger vibes, and oh my how watching that was such a shocker in my life time.

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people 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, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and 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, everything changes in an instant.