I will never be an astronaut. Roger that.

But thanks to Taylor Jenkins Reid, I felt like one for a short while. I'm not a pilot or an aeronautical engineer. My eyesight is poor. I suffer from horrible motion sickness and vertigo while here on earth. The beauty of reading a good book, though, is that it transports you.  

Quiet and careful Joan Goodwin has been working as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University but has been dreaming about the stars her whole life. When she has the opportunity to apply to NASA's new Space Shuttle Program, she takes it. NASA is looking for women scientists and Joan is the perfect candidate. She's chosen to join a crew of other exceptional candidates including pilots, medical doctors, mission specialists and engineers. The astronauts develop a community, and relationships deepen as they are forced to depend on each other for support on earth and above.

Set in the late 1970s and 80s in and around NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, and in orbit, Atmosphere dives into what it was like to be a woman qualified to be an astronaut. Correction:  what it was like to be more qualified to be an astronaut than anyone else, facing restrictions based on institutional limits, gender and sex bias, and any number of other discriminatory practices. At its heart, Atmosphere is a love story about people, the stars, and dreams, while providing so much technical information that I really did think for a minute, "I would have been good at Mission Control." You feel that much a part of things.

Summer is an ideal time to escape with an adventure that takes you away. With Atmosphere, the reader experiences it all: astronaut training, flight simulations, zero gravity, and the frustration of being a woman in the early days of the Space Shuttle Program. There's also love and heartbreak and the reality of what our place in the universe means on a grander scale.  If you appreciate Sally Ride, space missions, the 1980s, and Top Gun-style aviators, you will enjoy this book.