Imagine looking at yourself in the mirror-- examining the shape of your eyes, the curve of your lips, the color of your skin. When I look at myself in the mirror, I don't see just me; I see traces of my family. I thank my grandfather for the unusual blue of my eyes and then curse him for the way my cheeks bulge out like a chipmunk. I thank my mother for my full lips, but I have to laugh when I actually open my mouth and see her overbite staring right back at me. You see, my face isn't just my own. It's me, but it's more than that. It's me and everyone who came before.

Angel, the narrator of Linda Hogan's Solar Storms, is a Native American teenager who has been bounced from foster home to foster home. She doesn't have the luxury of looking into the mirror and knowing where she came from. Instead, all she has are scars cutting into her face. These scars, given to her years ago by her mother, are all Angel has to prove that she was ever anybody's child.

Angel has had it with the uncaring foster homes and the white families who refuse to understand her or acknowledge the importance of her ancestral heritage. So she goes looking for her roots, facing her fears about her abusive past, and finds her great-grandmother, Agnes, and her great-great-grandmother Dora Rouge.

In the arms of this family, Angel finally feels that she has a place where she is more than loved but in fact treasured. The family subsists on next to nothing, lives in a humble shack on the edge of the wilderness where they are constantly threatened by encroaching forces, which seek to steal what little the family has and flood their land to build a hydroelectric dam.

Native American tribes band togeth-er to fight the destruction of their homeland, but even amid the protests and the fears of losing all she's found, Angel can think of only one thing-- facing the mother who rejected her.

Taking Dora Rouge and Agnes with her, Angel packs everything she can carry in a small canoe and travels through the uncharted waters between Canada and the United States. She must find her ancestral homeland to the north, the place where her people came from, the place where her mother was last seen alive.

On the surface, Solar Storms is an adventure story with the unlikely heroes of a young girl and two old women facing one near-fatal disaster after another. But if you look a little deeper, Solar Storms is more than a typical adventure. It's the story of just how far a girl will go to find her heritage.

The next time Angel sets foot on dry land and looks into a mirror, she doesn't want to take her face for granted. Each line, each curve, each scar will speak of her history, and she will travel any distance to find out who she is. A+ --Cecilia Johnson

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