Solar Storms

Angel, who goes by the name of Angela Jensen at the beginning of the novel, is 17 when she returns to the north country. Tough, yet self-conscious about the half of her face having been scarred by her mother’s hand, Angel has gone from foster home to foster home, never having “lighted anywhere long enough to call it home” (26). She returns to the north country because she is running out of places to go to and thinks it might be better to stay with her blood kin. 

Angel’s initial home in the north country is Adam’s Rib, where Agnes lives with her mother, Dora-Rouge. Historically, Adam’s Rib is a place known for its abandoned women, who live there with their children after their fur-trapper husbands exhaust the area of its beavers and wolves. When Angel returns there, it is still a primarily matriarchal society, with so few men, “you could count them on the fingers of two hands” (28). Angela is put in the cot usually reserved for John Husk, a man who Agnes has ambiguous relations with.

Dora-Rouge mistakes Angela for her mother, Hannah, who washed up on the shores of Adam’s Rib in 1949. Through another story that Agnes tells her, Angel learns that the source of Hannah’s troubles came through her own mother, Loretta. Agnes’s son, Harold, was originally married to Bush, but he lost all interest in her when Loretta Wing arrived in 1938 from Elk Island. Loretta was seductive, with red hair and the almond odor of cyanide: “Some said she was haunted. They said something terrible had come along with her” (39). Enduring the loss of her tribe, a beating, and a rape, Loretta is incapable of love. When Harold and Loretta run off together, the result is Hannah, who arrives at Adam’s Rib in 1949, at age 10. 

Angel is still troubled from her experiences in foster homes; she retains the compulsion to steal from Agnes and Dora-Rouge, just as she did from her former hosts, though she stops herself. When Dora-Rouge notices that Angel has insomnia, she makes a herbal potion that will helps Angel sleep well for the first time in years. 

When Frenchie, a reckless and flirtatious woman, asks Angel about her scars, Angel becomes deeply self-conscious. When she looks at her face in the mirror, she has such a strong reaction that she breaks the glass. Reflecting on her life thus far, Angel considers that:

[her] ugliness as [she] called it, had ruled [her] life. [Her] need for love had been so great that [she] would offer [her]self to any boy or man who would take [her]…But the truth remained that [she] was wounded and cut and no one could, or would, tell [her] how it happened and no man or boy offered what [she] needed (54). 

On a card night, a man called LaRue Marks Time asks Angel when she is going to live with Bush on Fur Island. Angel is reluctant to leave and tells Agnes that she does not want to be sent to the island. She is beginning to settle into life at Adam’s Rib and feels like “water going back to itself. [She] was water falling into a lake and these women were that lake” (55). 

Two young men canoe up to Adam’s Rib and ask to speak with Agnes. Tommy, who makes a big impression on Angel, is also there. Their message is that the government plans to build a reservoir and several dams in the local area, which would cause flooding on the land the native people have lived on for many years. The government’s argument is that the people have no claim to the land, which is barren and useless. If their plan goes ahead, “the lives of the people who lived there would cease to be, a way of life would end in yet another act of displacement and betrayal” (58).

The forthcoming winter will delay proceedings and give time for protesters to organize themselves, but nevertheless, Angel “felt something in the air, that our lives were going to change, that nothing would remain the same” (59). 

Angel has to go and live with Bush on Fur Island. On the day she leaves, Dora-Rouge hands her a frog in amber, the object Angel had previously considered stealing. 

Bush is Fur Island’s only inhabitant. Fur Island is remote and shrouded in legends, including that two children living on the island had been raised by a pack of wolves. Moreover, it has a microclimate of its own, remaining at summer temperatures while Adam’s Rib has moved on to autumn. The house is old-fashioned and spartan, with “no bathroom, no electricity and no mirrors, because, as Bush said, mirrors had cost us our lives” (69). Angel comes to call Bush’s home “the House of No” because it seems a place defined by “what wasn’t there” (69).

Angel has mixed feelings towards Bush, who like her, understands loneliness and “had only thin, transient bonds to other people, having grown up on the outskirts of their lives” (67). Bush’s occupation is to assemble the bones of animal remains on the island and give them to LaRue, who sells them on to museums. Angel takes time to adjust and does not unpack her suitcase, convinced for days and weeks that she will return to the mainland one day with John Husk, who arrives by boat with supplies for them.

At Bush’s house, Angel sees a picture of herself as a baby without the scars and also one of Hannah, where a spirit of Loretta’s sweet almond smell lurks behind her. Angel considers that she has a fragmentary view of the past and vows to resolve this, wanting “an unbroken line between [her] and the past. [Angel] wanted not to be fragments and pieces left behind by fur traders, soldiers, priests and schools” (77). 

When Angel sees how storms move in on the island, she wonders how her mother, Hannah, reacted to the same phenomenon. Given the local people’s beliefs that human lives are witnessed by animals, Angel wonders what the animal kingdom and galaxy itself would have made of her mother’s strange life.