ADRENALINE CRUSH

Raised by her tattoo- and motorcycle-loving parents to take risks, Dyna injures herself in an accident and finds herself emotionally changed.

The opening scene sees Dyna racing through the woods on her mountain bike, speeding across a bridge and kissing the first boy she sees. Her final step, however, is a miscalculation; Dyna shatters her ankle, and the boy, Jay, takes her to the hospital. After the accident, Dyna plays it safe, watching TV at home and hanging out with Jay, who quickly becomes her boyfriend. Her mother, equally thrown (readers never learn how she managed to keep her risk-taking attitude through Dyna’s older brother’s many accidents), enrolls Dyna in a rehab group at the Ulysses Inner Outer Healing Center. There, Dyna meets Pierce, a young veteran who lost a leg saving another soldier and whose intensity and good looks somewhat heavy-handedly encourage Dyna to remember who she is. Never meaningfully addressed here is the dissonance between Dyna’s parents’ encouragement of risk and their sometimes-extreme overprotectiveness. Dyna’s father’s open hostility toward her boyfriend and her mother’s insistence that Jay promise to take care of Dyna seem oddly out of step with their apparent free-spiritedness.

Sometimes inspiring, sometimes overdone.