Acoustical engineer Maya Ortega is not your average New Yorker, and she'd be the first to say there is no such thing. But it's the late 2010s and her all-male team at Portman & Vale take a very unscientific view of noise and who gets to be heard. Fired for refusing to fake decibel maps, she reluctantly takes a late-night call-in slot, Signal at Seven, in a glass booth above Canal Street. Her data-based riffs on sirens, scaffolds, and silence grip the city. Soon overlooked tenants and night-shift workers step up to change the soundscape. One decibel at a time.
Sound nerds may enjoy the data; others might tune out.
This novel keeps asking the right question, "who deserves to be heard", but it shouts the answer at full blast.
Every motif arrives with sirens on! Silence is spelled out, scaffold clatter is annotated, and the equation of volume with power is underlined again and again.
The call-in format could have layered conflict and surprise, yet the voices line up to serve the thesis, and Maya's commentary smooths away mess.
I believe in the cause, truly, but theme is not a megaphone. Here the message drowns the music.
Viewed through a worldbuilding lens, the novel wants to map a living city in sound: sirens, scaffolds, measured silence. The effect is occasionally transportive, yet the cataloging can feel like a survey course where stakes dissolve into ambient noise. I admired the idea of shifting the soundscape one decibel at a time, but the streets never quite bite back.
Maya's interior monologue is prickly, funny, and lonely in equal measure.
Her callers, night-shift cleaners, exhausted tenants, and a drummer with battered ears, show small, specific lives that mostly ring true. The men at her old firm blur together, but the glass booth above Canal Street gives her a frame to push back, one caller at a time.
I went in excited by the premise. I came out with ringing ears and not the good kind.
The prose is packed with measurements and acronyms that read like meeting minutes. Scenes stall so someone can explain a waveform, again!
Chapter after chapter, the radio segments feel like transcripts, not drama. The cadence is flat, the segues abrupt, the tension pre-programmed.
When emotion finally pops, it is hammered by thesis statements about fairness in the city. I felt lectured, not moved.
I respect the research, but the storytelling? Tinny and off-key.
Fired for refusing to fake decibel maps, Maya pivots to the radio show "Signal at Seven" in a glass booth above Canal Street, and the late calls spark a slow, steady arc. The pacing wobbles, but the city chatter keeps it afloat.
