PURPOSE: In the field of youth concussion, the concept of "recovery" has undergone little critical scrutiny. As a result, little is known about what recovery "is" (what recovery looks like, what constitutes a "good" recovery, how youth understand their own recovery). MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted a critical conceptual review of 15 texts from health and rehabilitation sciences that implicitly or explicitly conceptualized youth concussion recovery. RESULTS: We identified what we have termed a dominant recovery narrative that was re/produced across texts. We have organized this narrative along three intersecting critical analytic threads: recovery as return to "normal," a timeline to recovery, a responsibility to recover. We elaborate each thread, demonstrating the ways they converged to represent concussion "recovery" in reductive terms (i.e., undergirded by ableism and developmentalism), making it difficult to think of recovery, and recovering youth, in any other terms. The authority of the dominant narrative was seldom questioned across texts. However, there were outliers to our synthesis, which offered rare points of resistance and demonstrated how recovery might be oriented "otherwise" (e.g., as living well with symptoms). CONCLUSION: This study has important implications for rehabilitation practice and research which are discussed.