That’s right, it’s ‘Reid’ not ‘Two Reeds’ as any Only Connect fans will giggle at, and they’re authors of very different novels.
Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Joan always dreamed of going to the stars, single-mindedly becoming an astrophysics professor and then applying to NASA, and to her immense joy, being accepted onto the astronaut training programme. Her sister Barbara is more than underwhelmed by this, it means that Aunty Joanie isn’t going to be available to be surrogate mum to her young daughter Frances as much. and she won’t cope.
Although Joan loves Franny more than anything else, her job will come first though. She is utterly driven by it, eschewing relationships so she can concentrate fully on the job. The trainee astronauts for the Space Shuttle are a varied bunch – her crew has a Top Gun pilot in Hank, mission specialists John Griffin and Lydia, the latter being brilliant and driven too; plus the friendly Donna and the enigmatic Vanessa, an engineer. Joan ends up being in the first crew from this cadre to go up into space, but when she returns she decides she’s fulfilled that dream and can be of most use in the launch centre where she makes a calm and supportive ‘Capcom’.
It’s this later role she’s performing as the novel actually begins in 1984, where a crew of Hank, Lydia, Vanessa and John are in space, and the latter two are about to undertake a space walk, they need to loosen some latches so a satellite can deploy.
She [Vanessa] lets go of the ship and moves through the hatch, to take her first step into space. Her legs feel steady as she wades into the darkness. Her eyes widen at the intensity of it, a void unlike anything she’s ever seen.
She looks up, past the payload bay doors, to see Earth in the distance. Clouds streak across the deserts of North Africa. For a moment, Vanessa stops and looks at the Indian Ocean.
Job done, they return to the airlock, and John suggests they watch the satellite deploy with the door still open. You just know it’s going to go wrong. One of the charges holding the satellite goes off in the wrong direction sending debris – a piece hits Griff piercing his suit – a hand over the hole will keep him alive until Vanessa can get him inside. By now all the alarms are going off, there’s been another hit somewhere. Obviously, the mission is aborted, it’s all about getting them home alive, others were injured too. Trajectories for return are being plotted. They’re all wired up to sensors, so Joan can tell those still alive including Vanessa what the score is.
Reid will return to the stricken shuttle later and we’ll find out what happens at the other end of the novel. In between we have the backstory of the trainee astronauts, we have Joan and Barbara’s rocky sibling relationship, with poor young Frances stuck in the middle, but we also have a romance. Not for nothing is the subtitle of this novel ‘A Love Story’.
Joan had thought that the fact she had never felt anything for the men she dated was because she was so driven by her job, but TJR very subtly engineers a slowburn different kind of romance that builds up over the first two thirds of the novel. You can read between the lines to work out who it’ll be with, it’s obvious really, and the author really makes you care and yes, I cried at the climax of the story.
TJR has done her research well into the shuttle programme, it all feels very real. The restaurants/bars like the real Frenchies and the Outpost Tavern where the astronauts go to let off steam are truly portrayed, all the period details of the early 1980s are on point. TJR also does well on how she gets the technical info over to her readers – obviously much can be communicated as they train, we learn enough but aren’t overwhelmed by it. All this provides a fantastic framework for the story of all the relationships and Joan’s central voyage of self-discovery, pitted against her sister’s penchant for unsuitable men and neglecting Frances.
This is only the second book by TJR that I’ve read, Daisy Jones & the Six being the first. I love both of them, but Daisy is done in documentary style, so very different to Atmosphere’s straight-forward narrative. I do have The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo on my shelves – is that a good one?
Source: Own copy. Hutchinson Heinemann hardback 2025, 339 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link (free UK+P&P)
Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid
Shakespearean retellings make a change from those of Ancient Greece, and naturally I couldn’t resist the blood-red sprayed edges and plait of the Waterstones exclusive signed edition! I’m old enough to know better, but it all adds to the reading experience.
Reid repurposes some of the elements of Shakespeare’s play, but makes it largely a medieval fantasy about Roscille, a seventeen-year-old Breton lady who is wed to Macbeth to ally the two fiefdoms. As she arrives in Glamis, she has swapped costumes with her maid Hawise as a precaution.
Roscille understands now. She is useful for the same reason that the Duke’s effort at disguising her is doomed: She is beitiful. It is not an ordinary beaity–whores and serving girls are sometimes beautiful but no one is rushing around to name them lady or robe them in bridal lace. It is an unearthly beauty that some in Wrybeard’s court call death-touched. Poison-eyed. Witch-kissed.
So fair Roscille wears a veil and casts her eyes down in the presence of men, lest they think she’ll bewitch them. As for her husband, he’s a battle-scarred hunk, but with a surprisingly good brain.
But she plays a trump card to delay their wedding night, saying it’s Breton tradition to be granted three requests before embracing the marital bed. She asks for a ruby on a gold necklace. The Thane of Cawdor has one such… but first he consults ‘les lavandières’, these are the three witches whom he keeps chained in an underground cavern, doomed to spend their days washing the same things. They prophesy he’ll become Thane of Cawdor and King thereafter. Off he goes with Banquo and his men to defeat Cawdor. Meanwhile, Roscille makes friends with Fléance, Banquo’s son, something that doesn’t endear her to the lad’s father who is suspicious of her.
And so it goes on. When Duncan the king comes to stay with his sons and retinue, Macbeth makes an elaborate plan to kill him, involving Roscille mesmerising his guards but raising her veil.
I could go on. Reid plays fast and free with Shakey’s play, using the bits that suit and raising Fléance from bit part to major player for a while and let’s just say, although Birnham Wood does sort of come to Dunsinane, the ending is not what we’re used to!
So this is Macbeth-inspired and if read as such was enjoyable fun. If you’re expecting quotations from the play to be built into the text forget it, although Reid does acknowledge her debt to Shakespeare, but also the lais of Marie de France, the 12thC poet. I now have Val McDermid’s Queen Macbeth novella on my piles, which I gather relies more on the real history of the time rather than Shakespeare too.
Source: Own copy. Del Rey hardback 2024, 295 pages. BUY in pbk at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link (free UK+ P&P)
