Young, beautiful, talented Alexis Winston comes from nowhere to become a figure skating superstar. But her rise to stardom isn’t easy. She has to push herself, reinvent herself, and most painfully of all, leave her hometown boyfriend behind. When a tragic fall leaves her blind, she needs someone to believe in her, to love her; someone to convince her she has the strength to skate and dream again.

Amerika – suggesting a Russified name for the United States – is an American television miniseries that was broadcast in 1987 on ABC. The miniseries inspired a novelization entitled Amerika: The Triumph of the American Spirit. Amerika starred Kris Kristofferson, Mariel Hemingway, Sam Neill, Robert Urich, and a 17-year-old Lara Flynn Boyle in her first major role. Amerika was about life in the United States after a bloodless takeover engineered by the Soviet Union. Not wanting to depict the actual takeover, ABC Entertainment president Brandon Stoddard set the miniseries ten years after the event, focusing on the demoralized American people a decade after the Soviet conquest. The intent, he later explained, was to explore the American spirit under such conditions, not to portray the conflict of the Soviet coup.