In this trite effort, ninth grader Nellie is a gymnast just getting ready to compete at the national level when she sustains a serious brain injury in an automobile accident. Her resentful, high-school-junior sister, Claire, was driving home after an underage party. She didn’t stop a drunken Nellie from hanging out the car window just before the accident. Claire is seemingly wracked with guilt as Nellie makes a slow, uneven recovery, but she's also angry at new limitations her parents have placed on her and must decide whether to extricate herself from a relationship with bad-boy Nick. Chapters are told from the alternating first-person, present-tense points of view of Claire, two of her friends and—very oddly—some undamaged part of Nellie’s brain. Merde! Nellie’s brain bizarrely lapses into French for occasional comments and refers to Nellie as “our girl,” forcing a confusing distance from Nellie herself, whose perspective is never captured. This diminishes her significance, although her injury is intended to be central to this hackneyed tale. A miss. (Fiction. 12 & up)
