Atmosphere | Taylor Jenkins Reid

Can we just start with the ending? Edge of my seat, breathlessly reading, thinking all along how this would make such a great movie. I read Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and really liked it Now she's followed this up with a great story about women, friendship, family, risk, loneliness, love. It's all here. I understand that the audiobook is spectacular, if you're an audiobook kind of reader. I'm starting to feel like I'm missing out by not listening to some of these books.

The setting is centered around Joan Goodwin, a scientist who is applying to the NASA space shuttle program in the 1980s. These were the earliest days of women in the space program and the pressure on Joan and her fellow women astronauts-to-be to meet, but more realistically exceed, the standards for the program is intense. Some of the women create strong bonds; other women struggle to do this in such a highly competitive and dangerous environment. You can see that Joan is searching for answers about life, love and family. She's deeply involved with her sister and her niece (no dad in the picture).

As the novel progresses, we see Joan, who is a natural leader, find her footing and figure things out. Culminating in the dramatic, breathless, aforementioned ending that was one of the best book endings I've read in a long time.

Like The Women by Kristin Hannah, this book celebrates the fact that women can do and are doing wonderful, daring, breakthrough and breathtaking things in their lives every single day.