Solar Storms

Angela Jenson is seventeen and has spent her childhood in the foster system in Oklahoma. A troubled Native American girl, she decides to find her family again and goes back to the place where she was raised, an island town on the border between Canada and Minnesota.

She arrives to find that a developer is pushing a plan to build a hydroelectric dam. If it goes ahead, sacred land will be flooded and left empty. Angela joins three other residents who are determined to stop it.

The fight over the dam is also a return for Angela. As she works against the project, she reconnects with her ancestral roots and with the people and land she came from.

This is a coming-of-age novel with an environmental conflict at its centre. It deals with clashes between cultures and with the traumatic consequences those clashes have had across American history. The tone is serious and often harrowing, and the book looks hard at what is lost when land and community are sacrificed to a development.