Review: "The Hard Parts" by Oksana Masters

The Hard Parts by Oksana Masters
Published 7 February 2023 via Scribner
★★★★

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.