A contemporary novel of love, disaster, and a touch of the inexplicable, Ripples Across Our Sky follows a family whose private grief collides with the quiet music of the cosmos.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Leila Haddad spends her nights parsing atmospheric noise on a borrowed HP 3585A spectrum analyzer and her days grading problem sets she never wanted to assign. When her late uncle's Gloucester radio shack is cleared out, she inherits a shoebox of cassette tapes, a duct-taped Sangean shortwave radio, and a hand-drawn star atlas annotated in cramped Arabic and ink-smudged English. The tapes hum with a recurring tremor that shouldn't be there, a pulse threading through storms and seasons like a heartbeat. With the help of her partner June Park, a coder who moonlights at a Porter Square tea shop, Leila turns the waveforms into spectrograms—and finds they align with small family events, right down to the day her father burned the baklava at Sanaa Sweets in Revere.
As the patterns point toward MIT's Haystack Observatory in Westford and a long-quiet lab fire from 1998, Leila uncovers evidence that a celebrated faculty mentor and a defense contractor buried inconvenient data about sonar interference along the Cape. The scandal casts a long shadow over her uncle's obsessive notebooks and the immigrant gamble that brought her parents to New England. Meanwhile, her father Farid begins to drift, losing words as steadily as the ocean takes the shoreline, and her brother Karim holes up in a creaking Cape Ann rental stocked with emergency candles and unsent letters.
When a late-season nor'easter barrels up the coast and the power fails from Dorchester to Cape Ann, the ripples on the tapes grow wild and insistent. Leila must decide what to publish and what to protect, and whether love is something you prove in peer review or in the backseat of a battered red Schwinn pedaling home through floodwater. To keep her family from splintering—and to keep the truth from being buried again—she follows the signal through salt, static, and memory, learning that some constellations are drawn not on the sky but across the people we refuse to let go.
Best for readers who like contemporary fiction with light science instrumentation and immigrant-family dynamics; note cognitive decline, off-page lab accident, storm damage, and workplace pressure, with minimal on-page violence and a muted romance.
I wanted to love these people and mostly felt like I was watching them through glass. Leila's mind is precise, but her heart-world reads in clipped packets; I kept waiting for the sentences to breathe when she was with June, and they rarely did.
Farid's fading feels too managed. The metaphor of erosion is repeated until it becomes a screen, and he seldom gets a scene where his voice leads, unmediated by a lyric overlay. It's gentle, yes, but so curated it numbs.
Karim's isolation is framed as a symptom and a clue, yet his motives drift. Letters pile up, candles stockpile, and I kept asking why this man does this now beyond the needs of the plot to gesture toward danger.
There are glimmers—June's tea shop warmth, a phone call that nails sibling weather—but the pattern keeps snapping back to symbols. When dialogue should give grain, it yields fog.
Read as a worldbuilding exercise, this is New England in a key of interference: Cambridge lecture halls humming with fluorescent fatigue, Cape Ann rentals sagging against damp, and a radio shack that feels like an altar to stubborn curiosity. The nor'easter sequence is tactile and properly miserable.
But the atmosphere narrows rather than expands the stakes. Haystack feeds mystery without ever becoming a place the reader can move through; Westford is a file drawer, not a landscape. The Sangean and the cassettes bring texture, yet the broader ecosystem—academic politics, contractor pressure, coastal economies—stays sketched. The novel keeps telling us a signal matters to the coast, while the coast itself remains mostly weather.
Craft critique: the book keeps toggling between scene and speculation, and the seams show. She attempts two modes: lab-log reportage and kitchen-table elegy. The first has bristly specifics (the HP 3585A, spectrograms, Haystack's archives), while the second leans on impressionistic fragments. The alternation slows momentum, and point of view skitters—Leila's interiority is firm in one chapter and then dissolves into omniscient murmurs in the next. The structure seems to want cumulative resonance, but the repetition of the same image systems (salt, static, drift) blunts their effect.
I kept waiting for the book's cosmic heartbeat to match the family's grief, to fuse into something tidal and undeniable. Instead, the signal flickers, the sorrow swells, and the two keep missing each other like trains passing in a blackout.
The motif is announced early and often: ripples in the tapes, ripples in a life. Then we get the thesis spelled out in the final stretch with a line about how "some constellations are drawn not on the sky but across the people we refuse to let go." I wanted to feel gutted; I felt coached.
The ethics of publish versus protect should detonate, yet the debate lands like a departmental colloquium. We circle the lab fire, the contractor, the mentor, but the moral heat disperses into mist. Why raise a scandal if we never feel the scorch?
And when the nor'easter hits, the pages finally roar, but the book keeps dialing back to lyrical static. I could hear the wind, see the Schwinn, and still the urgency thinned, as if a chorus of metaphors stood between the choice and its cost.
I admire the ambition, the attempt to harmonize instrument noise with family noise. But the frequency the novel settles on is faint, and I had to press the speaker to my ear, straining for a truth that never quite tuned in.
