Published June 3, 2025
Best known for charting the dazzling highs and inevitable falls of iconic women, the author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo offers something quieter here: a love story, celestial in scope, yet deeply personal. Taylor Jenkins Reid is back.
Set against the rigid, patriarchal framework of NASA in the early 1980s, Reid’s latest novel Atmosphere follows a lesbian romance that quite literally reaches for the stars. As in much of Reid’s work, her characters are rendered with uncanny immediacy. The novel’s protagonist, Joan Goodwin, is one of her most grounded and heroic creations. She cares for her niece, the daughter of her troubled sister, while dreaming of space. Joan, an astronomer with her gaze fixed permanently upward, earns a place among NASA’s first cohort of female astronauts. Alongside a cast of richly drawn fellow trainees, she competes for a shot at space travel.
Among them is Vanessa, a brilliant engineer with a chip on her shoulder. Their relationship begins in camaraderie and slowly evolves into something far more intimate. In an era when queerness meant exclusion, secrecy is their only path forward: “It seemed so clear to Joan, as crazy as it might be, that the meaning of life had to be up there, somewhere.” Her writing is yearning, introspective, and lit by the stoic bravery of its leads.
The romance, tenderly unfurled, carries the emotional weight one expects from her pen. The ache is painfully intimate and relatable, universal, striking a resonant chord. When Joan tells Vanessa, “You’re the first woman I’ve ever met who I feel like understands things about me before I even say them,” even readers not prone to swooning may find themselves unexpectedly sobbing into the pages. Such is the power of the world of Joan and Vanessa and all that they cannot have while secretly giving their innermost hearts to one another.
Weighing in at 337 pages, the narrative begins at a measured pace, bookended by mission STS-LR9. Those less invested in the technical rigor of space training might feel impatient with the early chapters. NASA’s tests, intense, physical, and borderline punishing, read like county fair rides endured mid-hangover. Still, they speak to the unshakable resolve of the astronauts, vying for liftoff.
Vanessa is in orbit; Joan, grounded in mission control. All has gone awry, but as it is with all books of this ilk...you knew this was coming . Their separation is both literal and metaphorical, with one aboard a failing shuttle, the other tethered to Earth. While the space plot follows a familiar arc, Reid’s talent ensures that the emotional stakes remain sky-high. The speculative elements take a back seat to the human ones.
Written with the confident clarity that has become Reid’s trademark, Atmosphere repurposes the tropes of space fiction to explore love, identity, and queer resistance. The result is a novel that is both expansive and deeply felt. Its conclusion lands with the bittersweet precision of a final transmission. I closed the book mourning not its outcome, but its ending.
