Abused and relinquished by her mother when very young, Angel has been moved from foster home to foster home. A rebellious, hurt, and literally scarred teenager, she sets out to search for her birth family, her mother, and herself. Finding her way to the remote region where she was born, Angel reencounters the brittle cold world where her ancestors have withstood both the harsh dangers of nature and the incursion of hostile outsiders.

Here she reunites with Agnes, her great-grandmother; Dora-Rouge, her great-great-grandmother; and Bush, the woman who adopted Angel's mother and raised Angel when she was a young girl.

But before Angel can settle into her new home, this recently rejoined family of women sets off by canoe on a journey to their ancestral homeland in the far North, where a hydroelectric dam project is under way. There Angel finds herself caught in a conflict that threatens two indigenous tribes, their ties to the land, and Angel's very essence as she tries to resolve her inner turmoil over who she is and where she belongs.

Robust and poetic, Solar Storms has the feel of a richly woven tapestry. Both as a story of love and family, and as a parable of the Native American quest to reclaim a lost way of life, the novel not only fulfills the enormous expectations raised by Linda Hogan's previous work, it surpasses it.