The unwanted daughter of a possessed mother, Angel is rescued by Bush as a baby and housed in foster care up until the age of 17. Moving restlessly from home to home, Angel, who is then known by the name Angela Jensen, loses track of her origins and identity, to the extent that she buys a picture of an unblemished baby from Woolworths. She is known as “the girl who ran away, the girl who never cried, the girl who was strong enough to tattoo her own arm and hand” (25). Still, Angel’s need for love comes out in her habits of stealing from every home she has ever lived in, and giving herself to any man who asks. At the beginning of the main narrative, when she returns to the north country, she is self-conscious and hides the scars her mother, Hannah, put on her face behind red hair that falls “like a waterfall” (25). 

Once she integrates into the community of women in Adam’s Rib, her boundaries soften and she feels a sense of belonging among both the people and wildlife. She inherits her great-great grandmother Dora-Rouge’s belief that the world “was a dense soup of love, creation all around us, full and intelligent” (81).