Thank you to Netgalley, Atlantic Books, and Sofi Oksanen for my arc of The Dog Park in exchange for an honest review.

Publication date: 4th November 2021

An interesting, well plotted novel which explores the global fertility market focusing specifically on the Ukraine post Soviet Union.

Its 2016 in Helsinki and Olenka sits in the dog park watching the perfect family and their little dog. A family she watches a lot. But it seems someone else is watching them too. Another woman has joined Olenka on the bench and this woman is dangerous. Not just to the family but to Olenka as well. But they are joined together by one important factor , they are watching another set of parents bring up their own children.

This book was incredibly well written and really quite fascinating. I had absolutely no idea about the global fertility market or the extent to which the western world exploits the poverty of the east in order to achieve pregnancy by questionable means. I also wasn’t aware of the risks to health both physical and mental from taking part in egg donation.

I’ve never really read anything about the Ukraine at all before so that element was really interesting for me too to learn about the changes the country experienced after the fall of the Soviet Union. The relationship Ukraine and had and continues to have with surrounding countries such as Russia and Finland and the dangerous illegal mines.

This is not a book to read quickly or take lightly. It is a serious book, dark and thought provoking. The characters and world building are complex and complicated. The story splits between different timespans and explores topics of politics, love, death, betrayal, poverty and revenge. I would recommend it to anyone! 4* only because of the open ending.

This book is startlingly relevant and important. I was moved and uncomfortable (in a way a reader should be!). It's brilliant and dark and bold. It absolutely lives up to the hype. Thank you so much for this ARC!

I found the premise of Sofi Oksanen’s Dog Park really intriguing. Set between early days of post-Soviet Ukraine and present-day Finland, it addresses the ways in which women sought to survive economic depression, endemic crime and corruption, and make lives better for themselves and their families.

Oksanen focuses on the exploitative fertility industry, a high-end fertility agency providing egg donors and surrogates to those who can afford it in the West. Our narrator, Olenka signs up as a donor after a failed modelling career, her family history and her own childhood in heavily polluted coal mining heartland cleaned up to paint a more attractive picture to prospective clients. She is a success and eventually becomes a co-ordinator at the agency. Efficient and professional, she finds and grooms new girls, promising an end to their financial worries. And she is happy with her morally dubious career until it intersects with a high-profile Ukrainian ‘businessman’ whose son and daughter in law haven’t been able to have children.

The Dog Park is highly atmospheric, Oksanen is excellent in setting scenes and evoking the sights, sounds and smells of the aftermath of socialism and the hardship ordinary people face. Illegal cottage industries – coal mining or growing poppies for low grade heroin abound among the rubble of falling infrastructure and the stink of boiled cabbage.

Oksanen builds tension well as revelations come slowly but inevitably. Sadly, this is where I found the novel a bit problematic. As we learn more about Olenka and her family’s past, I couldn’t quite reconcile her character - manipulative, sharp, a survivor – with some of her behaviour and I thought her, and some other characters underdeveloped. I also thought the plotting could have been tighter in the second half of the novel.

My thanks to Atlantic Books and Netgalley for the opportunity to read The Dog Park.

I honestly loved this book so much. I think initially it’s a little harder to get into, as the time skips can be confusing along with the initial use of vagueness around the topic of the book, but when we get into the main section of the book it really picks up and delivers. I enjoyed the female main characters, even if there are aspects of them that are heavily unlikeable, and the topic itself was intriguing and gripping.

This is a tough book to review. I want to give it ten stars for how much I adored it but I also want to give it only one star for the parts of the story that didn’t make sense (at least to me) and how the ending left me feeling really rather stupid.
The writing is brilliant, tense, taut and very atmospheric, you can literally feel the soviet misery leaving your mood as the story moves to the time Olenka the protagonist spends in Finland. The scenes from her early childhood in Estonia have the same upbeat and carefree feeling which the author disemploys as soon as the family move back to Eastern Ukraine.
I am clearly not a very good person because I was on Olenka’s side from the outset. So much of why she was in trouble at any part of the story was down to the actions of men during a time when she had been a small child. Old feuds that had nothing to do with her. Yes the fertility trade was exploitive but as she was first a victim of it I just felt relief for her when she was promoted.
Daria I had no sympathy for. I’m not sure if that’s because the author painted her in such a way that I felt she was an undeserving of my sympathy or if as I said earlier, I’m really not a very nice person.
Perhaps I fell for Olenka too fully and didn’t see how she personally exploited Daria but it seemed to me that she was trying to do her best to get Daria a career as a model and keep herself in money at the same time. With such grim prospects for women at that time in Ukraine I don’t see that as so very bad. Had Daria never met Olenka her life would have been one of coal, food shortages, living in a house with no internal plumbing.
I love the love story that is gradually unfolded in the novel and I wept for Olenka at many points.
I could wax lyrical for paragraphs about scenes I liked, characters I loved, Ivan being a shining example but suffice it to say; I’m really sad that I’ve finished the novel and won’t be spending time with Olenka any more, that the book kept me reading feverishly to the end and that the author’s trick of leaving things ambiguous but then suddenly tying up those loose strands during a flashback to a different place on the timeline was very impressive. I will be reading other books by Oksanen.
Now on to why I don’t like the book. As other reviewers have mentioned there are parts of the story that weren’t fleshed out enough. For a novel that centres around the fertility trade the novel skimmed over the top of the subject and didn’t give a deep enough emotional connection to the trade, either from donors other than Daria or from the clients seeking to become pregnant. This needed the same level of repeated discourse and eye for detail that the scenes regarding her father and the family’s move to Ukraine received.
And why do I feel stupid? Well I’m still not entirely sure whodunnit or why. I read the pages about that day multiple times but still can’t work out what various characters stood to gain or why blaming someone else would be warranted or necessary.
And the ending? Is she going to act or is she going to sit and wait for action to come to her? Is this deliberately ambiguous or am I just not reading the subtleties very well?
For all that the good outweighs the bad so I’ll take off one star because really, maybe I’m just about the ending because I didn’t want the book to end!

This book had a strong start and at times I felt hooked, especially once the plot started to make sense. However, nearly a quarter of the way in and I felt confused by the story’s progression. I love the payoff of an intricate plot that all makes sense at the end, but I felt like a lot had already been answered in Dog Park early on - that the plot wasn’t to go any further. I felt that quite a lot of the action was described rather than happening which slowed the book down. It’s a shame because I was really looking forward to reading this but I’m afraid I had to DNF.

So dark and gripping I'm still not sure how I feel about this book and it has been over a week since I finished it. Very different from anything I have read before.

A bleak psychological thriller set in Finland and the Ukraine. Two main characters Olenka and Daria visit a dog park to gaze upon children born as a result of their egg donations. Both are there for different reasons. The soviet union’s collapse is imminent and we are given insight into why the two women will do anything to survive including egg harvesting. A difficult and dark read and at times the reader feels empathy and dislike for the narrator. Can’t wait to see what the author writes next.
I received a free copy of this book via NetGalley from Atlantic Books.

Dog Park by Finnish-Estonian author Oksanen is a thriller noir about the global fertility market and the furtive goings-on at a Ukrainian fertility agency that offers donor eggs and surrogacy services to international clients.

At the outset, we meet Olenka on a bench at a dog park in Helsinki. Olenka is living a secret life eking out a living as a cleaner, a contrast to her former life as a senior manager at a fertility agency in the Ukraine where she mixed with the rich and powerful, wore furs and expensive clothing and was in a loving relationship.

Olenka is joined on the bench by Daria, whose life she ruined (we are told), and who ruined Olenka’s life. Exactly how this happened slowly unfurls over the course of the novel.

I was very much into this book for the first third - a fascinating premise and an intriguing setting in post-USSR Ukraine - but I did feel it disappointed somewhat in the execution of the plot.

It lost a little focus and morphed into more of a mafia story with a complex web of characters who weren’t always that interesting. The story about the agency and the women who offer up their services in exchange for cash - usually out of desperation for money and a better life - wasn’t fleshed out as much as I would have liked.

I did gain some intriguing insights into life in post-Soviet Ukraine. A few observations:
1. oppressive Communist regimes and raging unchecked capitalism are equally dreadful,
2. fertility clinics offering donor eggs and surrogacy services may use crafty unethical methods to dupe their clients,
3. the physical and mental toll on women who donate their eggs is not insignificant,
4. Rasputin-type charlatans still wield a bit of power in this part of the world which seems ripe with superstition in a population sceptical of authority.

Overall, an interesting one. I find books set behind the Iron Curtain or in post-Communist states pretty fascinating. This one didn’t quite live up to the blurb but was still a decent read. 3/5 ⭐️

This book is so good, it is dark, it is intense and I couldnt stop reading it, and when i did i couldnt stop thinking about it. Well written, the characters were so good too. I really enjoyed it.

Dog Park is a dark and tightly plotted affair, and borrows much from the thriller and the noir, with its backdrop of criminal goings-on, gruesome murders, and corruption at the highest levels. The novel shows much that is unsavoury about the fertility market, which it presents as exploitative both of its clients and the female donors. This, however, is presented as part of a wider and more shadowy web of politics, big business and criminality.

Much of the novel’s impact is achieved through Olenka’s first-person narration. The protagonist comes across as an interesting, three-dimensional character. She is both villain and victim - definitely unlikable, manipulative and unrepentantly Machiavellian in some of her behaviour, but also strangely beguiling. I found myself rooting for her despite her glaring faults.

Dog Park is both a page-turner and a book that requires patience. From the very first chapters, "what happened?" is the question that never leaves the reader"s mind. But Sofi Oksanen takes her time unravelling the whole story, because this is not a thriller but a social exploration of the fertility market and the impact it can have on donors' health, minds and indeed, life as a whole. This is a story of love and exile, of power and money, with Ukraine's modern history as background and an extremely skilful psychology of characters as its driving force.

This is a complex, intricate and fascinating take of fertility tourism and its after effects in Eastern Europe.
The narrator is, as a narrator a seemingly trustworthy former model from a small Ukrainian village. The tale flicks back and forth between present day, her life prior to fertility tourism and her life in the industry. While as a narrator she seems an honest enough voice as a character she, and the other main character, Daria, are both self preserving at almost all costs.
There were points where I slightly lost track of what and who was what and considered making a map of all the character links! Generally speaking though it was easy enough to follow where the time changes were.
It was also a good inspiration to find out more about Ukrainian culture in the USSR and immediate post USSR years and Oksanen creates a fascinating image of a world I know very little about

This is a story of betrayal, love and doing whatever it takes to survive. We meet the narrator Olenka in a park in Helsinki in the opening chapter and the arrival of an old familiar face unravels the new life she has scraped together. The format of the novel jumps back and forward in time with each chapter as we learn how and why Olenka has ended up in this new life. We learn of her early life in Ukraine and how she tries to escape the poverty and downtrodden life of her family and her ruthlessness that helps her to rise before ultimately causing everything to fall apart.
This is a gripping thriller style filled with the political tensions between Ukraine and Russia in recent decades as the under current of this story which I absolutely loved. It was fascinating to read about the illegal mining, bride "sales" and egg donations systems that desperate people resort to, to make a life for themselves. While I found the ending frustrating I have to say I couldn't put this down.
This is an honest review in exchange for an ARC

My, this is brilliant! Oksanen has penned a dark, dark story that reeks of despair and offers an unflinching portrait of hard lives in Ukraine in the complicated post-Soviet era. With poverty, a failing infrastructure, political instability and terrible memories of the past, we see the desperation that leads people to make what they can of their lives, whether that's men working in illegal mines, cooking low-grade heroin from poppy straw, and turning to crime; or women commodifying their own bodies through lucrative Western modelling contracts or becoming baby factories, from egg donation to surrogacy, no matter the costs to their physical and mental health.

Amidst all this is a compromised female narrator, a complicated and fractured story of love and betrayal, and a version of the 'chase' narrative. One of the things that Oksanen does so well is to subvert the keynotes and techniques of the thriller, while shoring it up with all the intelligence, political nous, emotional resonance and technical mastery of literary fiction.

This definitely isn't a book for readers who need to like the characters in a book - the political, historical and cultural contexts do away with any such psychological simplicities, and instead this is a searing evocation of people doing what they have to to survive and attempt to build lives when so much is stacked against them.

The narrative is broken up and much of the story has to be pieced together by the reader as we move across place and time, but always untangling the threads of love, death, betrayal, family and revenge that merge at the book's heart. That makes this sound melodramatic and it's not - and one of the skills shown by Oksanen is to take this high-octane material and make it part of the everyday fabric of post-Soviet life.

#1 of my 2021 books in celebration of Women in Translation month, and likely to be one of my best books of the year.

Sofi Oksanen’s Dog Park was originally published in Finnish in 2019 as Koirapuisto and is now being issued in an excellent English translation by Owen F. Witesman. It is a blistering novel which exposes, through the fictional story of protagonist, the dark underbelly of post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

The novel opens in Helsinki in 2016, where we meet Olenka sitting on a bench in a dog park, watching a couple and their two children. A stranger joins her. Except she is no stranger, but Daria, a figure from Olenka’s murky past in Ukraine. In fact, just a few years before, Olenka was not a down-at-heel cleaner eking out a living in a foreign country, but a well-off coordinator in a fertility agency in Ukraine, working at the margins of legality. Over the course of the novel, we slowly learn the details of a sordid story which has led Olenka’s and Daria’s paths to cross, and which connects the two once-friends to the family they are observing.

Dog Park is a dark and tightly plotted affair, and borrows much from the thriller and the noir, with its backdrop of criminal goings-on, gruesome murders, and corruption at the highest levels. The novel shows much that is unsavoury about the fertility market, which it presents as exploitative both of its clients and the female donors. This, however, is presented as part of a wider and more shadowy web of politics, big business and criminality.

Much of the novel’s impact is achieved through Olenka’s first-person narration. The protagonist comes across as an interesting, three-dimensional character. She is both villain and victim - definitely unlikable, manipulative and unrepentantly Machiavellian in some of her behaviour, but also strangely beguiling. I found myself rooting for her despite her glaring faults.

Plot-wise Oksanen skilfully keeps her cards close to her chest and reveals the details of her story slowly and tantalizingly. It is an approach which requires effort on the part of the reader who needs to piece facts together as in a big puzzle. Yet, despite the complexity of the narrative, Dog Park remains a gripping novel, a searing indictment of the dangers of both oppressive regimes and unbridled capitalism. Throughout, there is a sense of danger, an edgy feeling of impending tragedy, which fits its subject like a murderer’s glove.

Dog Park is a novel about betrayal, murder, and fertility, set between Ukraine and Finland in the 2000s. In Helsinki in 2016, a woman sits on a bench in a dog park, watching a family, when another woman sits next to her. A familiar woman she thought she wouldn't see again, and, like she was, a donor for couples unable to conceive. This woman—Daria—could be her downfall from a quiet life hiding in Finland, and has to remember everything she has run from.

This is a twisting novel that moves between Finland in 2016 and post-Soviet Ukraine, exploring dangerous family ties and the underground world fertility market. The chapters tell you the year and location, making it quite easy to keep track of what is going on, and the way it cuts between the two time periods works well, drawing out what the narrator Olenka is not explaining right away. The insight into Ukraine over the past thirty years, as well as Estonia and Finland, was fascinating, and both the geographical tensions and the lens of the fertility world worked well to add to this. I'd say it mostly felt more reflective than tense, with the narrative occasionally feeling a bit slow, but the world Dog Park depicts is gripping.

If you're looking for something fresh that offers a different perspective and is immersed in recent history, Dog Park is a good book to try, though its perhaps less of a thriller than a novel about complex histories, power relationships, and psychological damage.

This book would have got 5 stars were it not for the American translation. Very off putting and at times made it hard to understand certain things as phrases and words were unfamiliar. It felt very wrong for the characters to have American words and phrases
That aside this was a very good read and I did find myself wondering more and more about Russian/Ukraine and Finnish history. The book is quite dark with some very dark undertones that are not fully explored or fleshed out.
I did find myself empathising with the narrator/main character. There were some excellent phrases in the book too, like Hunger stopped up my ears. The blood leaving fingertips was somewhat overused.
After reading this I do feel that I would like to know more about the actual history. The story is all too believable. The glossary at the end was very helpful