Guns, grooms and gastropods

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/07/2025 (453 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Maria Reva’s debut novel gets rolling with a charming story of malacology (the study of snails) and ends with a country thrown into chaos by war.

Along the way, the Ukraine-born, Vancouver-based Reva explores romance tourism, climate change, artifice and propaganda, her own self-doubt and much more in her wildly inventive, brilliant first full-length novel.

Reva’s debut book, 2020’s Good Citizens Need Not Fear, was a collection of linked stories of residents in a dilapidated, near-forgotten apartment building in 1970s Ukraine. The book was shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and won the 2022 Kobzar Literary Award for the best book whose themes highlight the Ukrainian-Canadian experience. (In the interest of disclosure, this reviewer was one of the jurors of the prize.)

In the darkly funny Endling, whose title comes from the term for the last of a species before extinction, Reva once again takes readers to Ukraine, albeit in more modern times — on the eve of Russia’s 2022 invasion. We meet Yeva, a struggling conservationist living in a camper van converted into a mobile lab, tracking down rare snails in Ukraine in the hopes of getting them to mate — to prevent them from becoming endlings.

Yeva’s desperate to find a mate for her rare snail Lefty, afraid he will become the next endling in the face of the growing impact of climate change.

To help keep her malacological endeavours afloat, Yeva works in the bridal tourism industry, which sees mainly wealthy men travel from all corners of the globe in the hopes of finding a Ukrainian bride. It’s here she meets Nastia and Sol, sisters also working the bachelors, but with more nefarious motives.

Sol and Nastia’s mother was a feminist activist who deplored the industry, once famously flashing Vladimir Putin during a visit by the Russian leader to Hanover, and has since gone missing. Her daughters plan on bringing down the marriage-tourism industry by holding a group of bachelors hostage until their demands are met — and, they hope, their mother will see their actions and reappear from wherever it is she went.

The sisters convince Yeva to employ her mobile lab in the heist; a dozen men are lured into (and locked in) the camper van with the promise of a special evening with budding brides — which, of course, never comes to pass. It’s all setting up to be a quirky, darkly funny story of looking for love, be it for snails, men or otherwise.

Then Russia invades Ukraine at the end of Part I, some 100 pages into Endling — and Reva calls a time out on the narrative before everything goes completely sideways.

The book’s brief middle section, Part II, sees Reva (or an autofictionalized version of Reva) enter the novel, ruminating in the first person on the struggles of her writing process, and about writing about Ukraine when a real-life war has broken out. We see increasingly frustrated emails between the author and publishers, a meandering grant application for the book and more.

“Now that Russia is conducting a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the central conflict woven into the delicate fabric of my novel, namely the influx of Western suitors into Ukraine, has been subjugated — or ripped apart, to keep with the metaphor — by a far more violent and destructive narrative,” Reva writes in the grant application about her “novel (postnovel? yet-to-be-defined entity?).”

We’re then given a brisk, neat-and-tidy ending to the novel, a list of (real) acknowledgments and a (real) note about the author and the type face — all of which you’d typically find at the close of a book.

Which is all fine and dandy — except there’s 200 or so pages, giving the reader a hint there’s plenty more to come.

While such an authorial interjection in the middle of a book could be off-putting or clumsy in the hands of some authors, Reva navigates the move brilliantly before plunging the reader back into the action. It’s a brief, insightful respite from what’s to come — a third act brimming with intensity and anxiety.

In Part III we rejoin the group as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine begins in earnest, with the trio women trying to figure out what to do with the kidnapped bachelors now that war has broken out. After unsuccessfully trying to offload the kidnapped bachelors, the mobile lab with Yeva, Nastia, Sol and the gang heads south to the real-life (and now war-ravaged) port city of Kherson, where Yeva may have finally found a mate for Lefty and where the grandfather of Masha, the romance tourism owner, lives.

Masha offers Sol and Nastia a deal — get her grandfather out, and she’ll provide information on the whereabouts of their mother.

Venturing into one of the most dangerous sections of war-torn Ukraine brings the women and their captives in close contact with gunfire and all manner of danger, including the shooting of a scene for a Russian propaganda piece about the liberation of Ukraine. As Yeva locates the acacia tree where Lefty’s potential mate might be found, the country and its people are being pushed toward becoming endlings themselves.

Reva masterfully ramps up the tension and danger page by page in the latter half of Endling. Despite her anxiety in her interlude/interjection about the book in the novel’s middle section, she masterfully brings together seemingly disparate threads by the book’s end, never sacrificing humour along the way.

Ben Sigurdson is the Free Press literary editor.