Dog Park begins with two women originally from Ukraine sharing a bench at a park in Helsinki. As picturesque images go, it's just about the only one on offer in Finnish-Estonian novelist Sofi Oksanen's superb but pitiless thriller.
Narrator Olenka has recently begun working as a cleaning woman--part of a self-reinvention ("I had a Finnish passport and a new life in a city that smelled of the sea") that was undertaken for reasons initially unclear to readers. The shock of seeing Daria beside her on the bench prompts Olenka to recall her life in post-Soviet Ukraine, where, following the fizzling of the modeling career that was supposed to bring her financial security, she donated her eggs to an agency that paid young women for the opportunity to help infertile couples. Olenka became a coordinator for the agency, which found an eager recruit in Daria, a university student keen to make money to help her family.
Oksanen (Purge; When the Doves Disappeared; Norma) is an unflinching storyteller with a commitment to discouraging easy and obvious sympathies; as Olenka's narration jumps back and forth in time, readers' loyalty to some characters will be tested, as will an initial revulsion to others. Dog Park charts the particular degradations that women suffer due to war, poverty and imperialism, although one source of cruelty is purely psychological: as Daria says to Olenka of one of the couples who did business with the agency, "They don't remember you any more than me." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer