Previous
Prologue
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Solar Storms, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Healing
Displacement and Belonging
Cycles of Violence
Environmental Stewardship
Spirituality and Resistance
Summary
Analysis
In 1972, when Angel is 17, she returns for the first time to Adam’s Rib, the place she lived in her infancy and where some of her family still remains. As the ferry passes Fur Island on its way to the mainland, Angel spots a woman in a canoe, who she will later learn is Bush. Angel is returning now because, just weeks earlier, she found Agnes Iron’s name in court records and wrote to her. Agnes responded immediately, urging Angel to come and enclosing enough money for the ferry. When Agnes meets Angel at the dock, she says nothing—she simply pulls her long-lost great-granddaughter into a warm hug.
Angel’s arrival is marked by ambiguity—she’s seeking answers about her past but is unsure of her place in this unfamiliar land. Though her bond with Agnes hasn’t yet formed, Agnes’s silent embrace suggests that emotional connection doesn’t always require words; some feelings are beyond language. The appearance of Bush, meanwhile, reinforces how much of Angel’s past is still just out of reach—familiar, but distant.
Active
Themes
As they walk to Agnes’s house, neither says much. Angel hardly remembers her great-grandmother and isn’t sure how to start a conversation, but she hopes Agnes can help her piece together her past. Angel’s face is scarred—she knows her mother, a violent woman, caused it—but she doesn’t remember how it happened, and no one will tell her. She was taken from Hannah young and placed in foster care, moving through one home after another without ever feeling like she belonged. Now, Angel says, the only things she truly owns are her fear and her rage.
Angel’s uncertainty about her own history is all the more frustrating because of the power imbalance at the heart of the matter: there are people around her who know the truth, but they refuse to reveal it, thus controlling the narrative of her life. Her reference to fear and rage as possessions demonstrates how thoroughly she’s been influenced by instability, and how little of herself she’s been allowed to truly keep. Fear and rage are the only constants she has known. The physical scars on her face ultimately stand in for a deeper wound, one tied to a mother she doesn’t understand and childhood experiences that have been obscured.
Active
Themes
The first women to settle in Adam’s Rib called themselves the Abandoned Ones. They came during the fur trade, but when the land was depleted and the French trappers left, the women remained. Today, very few men live in Adam’s Rib. Agnes’s small, dilapidated house, like many in the area, was built by Christian missionaries. She lives along the Hundred-Year-Old Road, where her neighbors are the oldest members of the community—mostly women, who themselves refuse to live in homes built by the missionaries. These elders are rarely seen, but they hold the memories of their people, having lived through such tragedies as Wounded Knee.
Active
Themes
When Dora-Rouge (Agnes’s mother, who lives with her) first sees Angel, she mistakes her for Hannah. Her memory comes and goes—some days she’s sharper than others—and she often drifts into the past, as if it were still the present. She tells Angel that she always knew she would return. Later, Agnes and Angel carry Dora-Rouge outside to sit in the sun, and as Agnes struggles to lift her mother, Angel starts to imagine a role for herself here: helping Agnes by easing the burdens she carries.
Active
Themes
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John Husk, a handsome local fisherman, amateur scientist, and longtime friend of Agnes, comes over for dinner. Angel immediately takes a liking to him. Though he and Agnes aren’t formally a couple, it’s clear they care deeply for each other. The community sees it, and so does Angel—there’s love between them. That night, she sleeps on a cot that she realizes formerly belonged to Husk. Now that she’s staying here, Agnes and Husk are sharing a bed for what Angel suspects is the first time. Her presence, she thinks, is already making good things happen.
Active
Themes
Agnes tells Angel what she knows about her origins, beginning with Bush’s arrival in Adam’s Rib. Harold—Agnes’s son and Angel’s grandfather—met Bush while working on an oil field in Oklahoma, married her, and brought her north. Bush was quiet and reserved, and she never fully fit in with the other women. Then Loretta Wing arrived—strange, ethereal, and alluring to the men, especially Harold. Loretta carried the inherited sorrow of her people from Elk Island, many of whom were poisoned by cyanide-laced deer meat they had no choice but to eat. Agnes recalls how Loretta always smelled of cyanide.
Active
Themes
In time, Loretta would pass down the same cycle of abuse that had shaped her. She and Harold ran away from Adam’s Rib together, abandoning Bush in a community that had never accepted her. Agnes never saw her son or Loretta again—until their daughter, Hannah, returned to Adam’s Rib at the age of 10, emerging from the water and somehow carrying that same faint cyanide scent. Bush, convinced that Hannah was a piece of Harold returning to her, loved the girl in spite of the “blood-deep” poison inside of her.
