I think a major part of the Olympic Games is under valued and that was reiterated to me reading this book. The Paralympic Games are full of amazing athletes with incredible stories and I'm so glad I got to delve deeper into this one.

Oksana's life has been hard, but her efforts to be the best in multiple sports would be a feat even without her backstory. I loved her vulnerability as she shared both extremes of emotion, happy and sad, and how she wrote about how her life has been shaped by how she deals with those ups and downs.

If you are looking for an Olympic read that will carry you beyond the closing of the traditional Olympic Games, pick this one up. It is great on audio.

Thanks to Libro.fm, Simon Audio and Scribner for the audio copy. All opinions are my own.

Special thanks to NetGalley for the advanced reader copy of this memoir. A thousand times YES!! This memoir is absolutely inspiring! LOVED IT!!!

I absolutely loved this book! Would highly recommend to anyone. This wasn't always the easiest of reads due to some of the hardships she had to endure, but I am so glad that I did.

I have never said this before in a book review but Oksana Masters' memoir, The Hard Parts, broke my heart and put it together again. I cried both sad and happy tears beginning with the dedication.

Born in the Ukraine in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, Oksana had numerous birth defects and was given up for adoption.
Unfortunately, the Ukrainian orphanage was the stuff of nightmares. Fortunately, Oksana was adopted at age seven (she was the size of a three year old) by an amazing single American woman and began the arduous journey to deal with numerous surgeries and setbacks as well as severe PTSD. Against all odds, through grit and determination and with the unconditional loving support of her mother, Oksana not only survived but thrived becoming a world class Paralympic champion in multiple events.

I won't lie, The Hard Parts was a tough read. I can't stop thinking about it. It is haunting but also incredibly powerful and inspiring. It is one of the best memoirs I have read in a very long time.

TW: deprivation; physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; self harm.

I received a drc from the publisher via NetGalley.

This will, hands down, be one of my top memoirs of 2023!

The Hard Parts was an incredible memoir by Oksana Masters, in which she details her traumatizing childhood in an orphanage until adoption by her mother. She then describes her journey in athletics and in learning to love herself.

I listened to this on audio, and the narration was great! It was a quick read, and I found myself sobbing multiple times. This one is an emotional read, especially for myself as a mom. Phew.

I applaud Oksana's courage and dedication in sharing her story with the world!

thank you Scribner Books for the gifted copy!

The Hard Parts by Oksana Masters is an inspiring story of triumph over trauma and disability. She was born in Ukraine and exposed in utero to radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear station. Born with complicated and multiple physical impairments, she was placed in an orphanage and suffered horrible abuse there.

Finally adopted at age seven by an American woman, Gay Masters, Oksana was loved and cared for in every aspect of her life. But she was also subjected to bullying at school, several medical setbacks including amputation of both legs, and all that came with the normal circumstances of puberty. Through her own inner strength and the assistance of her mother and friends she was somehow able to rise above her physical challenges and become a top-notch athlete, competing and winning medals in rowing, biathlon, cross-county skiing, and road cycling at the Olympic level.

Oksana's story is inspirational, raw, honest, motivating, courageous, and remarkable. I highly recommend this memoir and can guarantee that readers will come away from it changed for the better.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Scribner, for access to an e-book copy in return for an honest review.

Many are familiar with Masters, the athlete, but this tells a bit of her story behind that. While I admired her before reading this story, that admiration has grown so much. She is such an inspiration! She is determined and encouraged the reader to set their path ... and then fight for it, always moving forward (even if the steps are small). Her story is heartbreaking but uplifting at the same time. The relationship between her and her mother was amazing. For anyone dealing with trauma of some kind, this book will give you a good dose of hope, particularly in the fact that your past doesn't need to define you and hold you back.

All you need to do to know that Masters is an exceptional athlete is look at her Wikipedia page: medal, medal, medal, medal... Her first athletic love was rowing, but a combination of injury and delight in having a challenge led her to skiing and cycling.

But "The Hard Parts" isn't about that, not really. Sports matter in this book—they became a vital outlet for Masters, and a way of proving to herself that she was capable and powerful—but Masters didn't have an easy or direct road to them, and in fact the "hard parts" were the dominating parts for much of her childhood. Born in Ukraine, in the shadow of Chernobyl, Masters had physical deformities that in a place with limited resources meant being consigned to an orphanage and...well, given up on, I suppose. Treated as disposable. I think it would be disservice to Masters to try to explain her particular circumstances in detail—I'd rather leave it to the words she uses herself in the book—but I will say that the orphanage lived up to nearly every grim expectation and stereotype you might have of an orphanage in Eastern Europe immediately after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and that Masters was the size of an average three-year-old when she was adopted at the age of seven.

I wondered, early on in the book, if it was doing itself a disservice by taking a chronological form rather than shifting back and forth between Masters' life in the US and her childhood in Ukraine, but the farther I got in the more I understood that she was in fact doing that—laying the foundation and then making smaller shifts back and forth to illustrate how the abuse and neglect of her childhood continued to affect her, and how she was able to gradually process it. Intermingled with this, of course, is Masters' introduction to the world of the Paralympics, some of which is so completely infuriating: she notes, for example, that her Team USA gear was first team uniform she'd ever worn, because she'd never truly been allowed to participate in school. It's illustrative of this odd irony, I think, one that must be true for many people with disabilities: that her options were to compete at the highest level or not at all. She happened to have the talent and the drive and the creativity to compete at that high level.

There's so much that I want to say here—like, I'm fascinated by the way that Masters describes some of para-athleticism as being a matter of figuring out how to make a given sport work best for her body's strengths and weaknesses and quirks; obviously able-bodied athletes also work to their strengths and so on, but the potential for variation with para-athletes seems to be on a different level. But in the spirit of not accidentally writing a dissertation about a book (...wouldn't be the first time...), I'll leave off on an important note: that Masters' mother is an absolute hero of this story, as fierce an advocate as any child could hope for.

3.5 stars.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a free review copy through NetGalley.

The Hard Parts
A Memoir of Courage and Triumph
by Oksana Masters
Pub Date 21 Feb 2023 | Archive Date 21 Feb 2023
Scribner
Biographies & Memoirs


I am reviewing a copy of The Hard Parts through Scribner and Netgalley:



Oksana Masters by no means had an easy life, nor an easy start to life. She was born in the Ukraine in the shadows of Chernobyl, and it seemingly seemed the world was against her. She was born with six toes on each foot one kidney, a partial stomach, webbed fingers, no right bicep, and no thumbs. Her left leg was six inches shorter than her right, and she was missing both tibias.


She had been relinquished to the orphanage system by birth parents daunted by the staggering cost of what would be their child’s medical care, Oksana encountered numerous abuses, some horrifying. Salvation came at age seven when Gay Masters, an unmarried American professor who saw a photo of the little girl and became haunted by her eyes, waged a two-year war against stubborn adoption authorities to rescue Oksana from her circumstances.


After coming to America, Oksana would endure years of operations which included a double leg amputation. She wondered how she could ever fit in, as she had so many things that made her different.


But Oksana would more than fit in. She was determined to prove herself and had a strong drive to succeed that still smoldered from childhood, Oksana triumphed in not just one sport but four—winning against the world’s best in elite rowing, biathlon, cross-country skiing, and road cycling competitions. Now considered one of the world’s top athletes, she is the recipient of seventeen Paralympic medals, the most of any US athlete of the Winter Games, Paralympic or Olympic.


The Hard Parts is Oksana's story of triumph, of proving to herself and to the world. It's the story of a Mother's love and a daughter's determination. This book is a reminder to anyone who doesn’t fit in: you can find a place where you excel where you have worth.


I give The Hard Parts five out of five stars!


Happy Reading!

Oksana Masters faced more odds in a single year of her life than most of us will in all our years combined, and yet with her fighting spirit, she has already conquered far more than most of us will in our full lifetime. I like overcomer stories, but this was that and far more. She faced life as an orphan with multiple birth defects traced to the Chernobyl disaster her biological mother had endured. Oksana's life resembles a football tackle where everyone piles on even after the tackle is made. Challenge upon challenges to simply function in the world filled with obstacles. This memoir is an engaging page turner that left me both inspired and challenged. Do yourself a favor and read this book.

My thanks to the publisher for allowing me to read this advance copy.