Lovers in a dangerous time
Three women who work in the escort business in Ukraine (one a mollusk researcher) kidnap some of their customers just as Russia invades.
May 05th, 2025
Ukraine-born Maria Reva grew up in Vancouver. She has an MFA in fiction and playwriting from the Michener Center at the University of Texas. In addition to writing, she also works as an opera librettist. Photo Anya Chibis
“There’s a love scene between snails that’s raunchier and more tender than ninety per cent of the CanLit erotica being generated as we speak. Even the trapped bachelors ask is it ‘wrong to look for love in a time of war? The search isn’t any easier in peacetime.’”—reviewer Trevor Carolan.
Review by Trevor Carolan
Having published widely in magazines such as Granta and The Atlantic, Maria Reva’s new novel Endling (Knopf $36) arrives, as realtors say, “with good bones.” Acclaim greeted her debut collection of short fiction, Good Citizens Need Not Fear (Vintage, 2021) with its title borrowed from “funnyman” Josef Stalin. The omens look good for this BC-Ukrainian author’s road-trip tale overshadowed by Russia’s monstrous invasion of her family homeland.
A prologue sketches the mild, 2022 pre-invasion landscape: “In the cities, buildings still stood whole…Beyond the fields, sky. A sturdy solid blue, like a freshly painted ceiling.” Two of the three main characters appear—Anastasia, nicknamed Nastia, who is starlet pretty; and Yeva, an independent scholar researching snails. Nastia and her third-wheel sister Solomiya (Sol) work in Ukraine’s robust, pre-invasion “Romance Tour” industry. Their Romeo-Meets-Yulia agency bosses suggest that heaven is indeed near for foreign male suitors aching for a compliant, pre-feminist era wife. From Manila to Kyiv and Bangkok, it’s an industry that coins solid gold from loneliness.
Yeva takes the spotlight. Uninterested in rescuing Nastia or Sol from the Brides for Sale biz, she has her own worries—“mollusk conservation… the Russian tanks amassing at the border and how no one believed anything would come of it except Yeva.” She’s a loner who knows everyone is tired of her ecological concerns—“Even Yeva was tired of Yeva.” One catch: impassioned about saving snails from extinction, and the owner of an aging RV mobile lab, she’s a self-funded scientist. But government and NGO research grants are drying up. Weary of grovelling after research support, and needing cash, she’s joined the stilettos and shapewear romance tour circus herself, dressing up for aging bachelors at grotty receptions, and drinking wine that “tastes like acid reflux.”
Unfamiliar with the tours? Actual boogie-woogie is only ever hinted at. It’s more a case of, “sell the sizzle, not the steak.” Yet, customers come back for more. With no shortage of tour “brides” or “bachelors” willing to participate, the boss lady, we learn operates not from Kyiv, but from what sounds suspiciously like—to this native son—“The Royal City” of New Westminster. Queen Victoria will not be amused.
Plot is but one of Reva’s technical considerations. There’s a story alright, with authorial interventions that speak directly to readers, two endings, jumbled narrative sequences, autobiographical fictions/non-fictions, quirky author-agent discussions, misplaced wacky end-of-book matter, the lot. At times, it’s chop-and-chancy writing. There’s also the horror underway of invading thugs from the Steppes. While the sisters hustle Yeva into a hairbrained scheme involving kidnapped tour “bachelors” in a frantic search for their mother, Yeva searches for a mate for her beloved snail, Lefty, possibly the last survivor of his kind, hence an “Endling.” The crowded lab of duped bachelors who dream of finding The One, we learn, are simply media-bait. They’ll lure out the sisters’ lost mother, a former incendiary anti-romance tour activist. Collectively, these road warriors bounce absurdly along.
We’re in Eastern Europe remember, with its clunky attempts to catch up to “the rotten late capitalist West.” Posh restaurants serve pizza and sushi, while laptops feed reports of buildings in flames and tanks battering Kyiv’s eastern gateway. “Ossetia, Grozny, Aleppo. The Russians have done all of this before,” Yeva recalls. It’s early in the war, but we too remember the Trojan defenders of Mariupol and Kharkiv. Reflecting on her snail-preservation, Yeva realizes her, “earlier snail rescues were but rehearsals for the real thing, with people.”
Unconventionally, the author includes a travel-grant application of her own for a Ukraine visit. Real-life seekers after same will recognize the pro forma bureaucratic language involved. Quickly, a mid-book ending looms with proofreader notes, blank pages, then we’re back in Ukraine where three women have locked-up thirteen foreign bachelors, shunting them around a country at war. Oddly, even amidst panic and explosions Yeva can hear family voices urging her to settle and raise children. Ah, the old-world charm! “If your new husband goes down fighting, well, at least you’ll have tried,” her mother says. “Better to be the stoic widow of a war hero than a spinster.”
There’s flight to the mountains, military convoys nearby, new chaos and concern for the now-risky bachelors—perfect timing for an impulsive detour to save a relative in embattled Kherson. Notes enter from what we’re told was a genuine author visit to the combat zone. Air-raid sirens wail. There’s full-out war. Teslas drive past with generators strapped on top. What’s real? A fake Russian liberation video-shoot clarifies little. Everyone is roped in, even the snails. There’s a fateful family encounter.
At times, this tale reads partly like a grad school stage-play where the author can’t get out of it, switches to lecturing, then back again. Readers need to be agile, recognize crazy wisdom when an aged loved one can refuse to leave the madness of war because, “It’s where he feels safe.” There’s a love scene between snails that’s raunchier and more tender than ninety per cent of the CanLit erotica being generated as we speak. Even the trapped bachelors ask is it “wrong to look for love in a time of war? The search [isn’t] any easier in peacetime.”
Reva’s book is the product of a fantastic imagination. She doesn’t make it easy. What’s it like when your original homeland is war-torn? “You become like a lizard,” one bachelor says, “where there’s no past or future, where everything’s trained on the present.” Elbows up, Canada. 9780735278448
New Westminster-raised poet, author and reviewer, Trevor Carolan, is recently returned from an Eastern Europe trip.
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