Review by Booklist Review
This is absurdist literary fiction about a sympathetic cast of characters (including a fictionalized version of the author herself) caught in the chaos of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yeva, a beautiful, asexual snail scientist, is forced to join a matchmaking agency to pay for her conservation work. There, she encounters sisters Sol and Nastia, who plan to kidnap the agency's customers (the bachelors) as a form of radical protest in the hope that their feminist, activist mother will acknowledge them and come out of hiding. Yeva agrees to let the sisters use her mobile lab--RV to transport the bachelors from Kyiv to Kherson. Meanwhile, Yeva is carrying on with her work to locate a mate for her favorite endangered snail, which she lovingly calls Lefty. So it's not surprising that amid the bombs exploding around them, she ventures out in her mobile lab (towing the scheming women and kidnapped bachelors) to geolocate a fallen tree that might hold Lefty's precious snail mate, which leads to disaster. This darkly humorous story pulls off a ridiculous yet sobering plot with clever metafiction that inadvertently dissects the Russo-Ukrainian War. The powerful symbolism of Yeva and her snails will keep readers riveted.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Reva's astonishing metafictional tale (after Good Citizens Need Not Fear), a Ukrainian Canadian writer named Maria Reva attempts to write a novel about Ukraine's mail-order bride industry on the eve of the Russian invasion. The novel's first part consists of Reva's novel in progress featuring Yeva, a snail conservationist working to save a species on the brink of extinction by traveling around the country in her RV turned lab to find specimens for breeding. To pay for her equipment, she joins guided romance tours and goes on dates with Western men looking for a pliable Ukrainian bride. Meanwhile, sisters Nastia and Sol strive to take the bridal industry down. After Nastia borrows Yeva's RV with a plan to kidnap 12 of the bachelors, Russia invades and Reva's manuscript grinds to a halt. Reva emerges as a character in the second part, reeling from the bombings and worrying about her grandfather, who still resides in occupied Kherson, as she watches the news from Vancouver. She disappoints her agent with the news that she's quit the novel ("I was writing about a so-called invasion of Western bachelors to Ukraine, and then an actual invasion happened.... To continue now seems unforgivable"). Reva then writes a grant proposal to travel in Ukraine for research on a "postnovel" about her birth country in flux. When she returns in the final section to her three revolutionary anti-brides, their adventure brilliantly dovetails with Reva's literary experiment and wartime reckoning. This inspired and urgent novel is bound to make a major splash. (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT In her multilayered debut novel, Reva takes readers on a twisting and timely journey through modern Ukraine. The tale is centered on Yeva, a Ukrainian scientist who makes ends meet by working on "romance tours" that cater to foreign men seeking their fantasy subservient wives. Yeva's passion is a quixotic mission to save rare snail species from extinction. Soon, she is embroiled in an ill-conceived kidnapping scheme, made more disastrous by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. On the surface, the novel's plot is straightforwardly thrilling, and Reva (who was born in Ukraine but now lives in Canada) employs just enough dry humor to highlight the absurdity of the world that has led her characters to their harrowing situations. But a narrative swerve reveals deeper grapplings as the novel, through multiple points-of-view, witnesses from afar the unfolding war in the author's home country. This work on feminist outrage, environmental destruction, and the inhumanity of war is not didactic; instead, it is a page-turning, genre-bending meta-novel as entertaining as it is gut-wrenching, whose experiments with literary form will keep readers on their toes. VERDICT Equal parts madcap caper, contemporary allegory, and wartime reckoning, Reva's debut offers a fresh take on the current Russia-Ukraine war from a diasporan point of view.--Shannon Titas
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
What begins as a wacky picaresque involving snail conservation, a missing mother, and an RV full of kidnapped Western bachelors shatters into a metafictional reckoning with the war in Ukraine. An endling is the last known member of a species before it becomes extinct, and Reva's debut novel is both about one such creature--a charming left-coiling snail named Lefty--and meant to embody the term itself, as a glimpse of a lost world. Or, as the author's agent asks her at one of the first autofictional asides in the narrative, "Wasn't your novel originally going to be about a marriage agency in Ukraine?" Well, it probably was. And it was also going to be about snails. The three central characters are 18-year-old Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, who work for a Ukrainian "romance tour" outfit, and Yeva, a scientist dedicated to saving and preserving snail species in her mobile lab (a beat-up RV), though she also moonlights at the bridal agency when she needs cash. The three come together when the sisters devise a plot they hope will result in the return of their missing mother, a famous activist who plotted stunts meant to derail the agency and its industry. The plot involves kidnapping a dozen men from the latest group of wife-seekers and holding them in Yeva's RV. This plan, and the novel containing it, are themselves derailed by the Russian invasion of 2022. This results in a hasty wrap-up of the narrative early in its second hundred pages, followed by back matter and what turns out to be a rather premature acknowledgments section. After a few blank pages, the novel resumes and continues on both fictional and metafictional trajectories, including grant applications in which Reva seeks support for continuing her work and a resumption of the main storyline in the midst of war. Her success at keeping that storyline alive, full of suspense and humor, while never letting go of what is really happening in the lives of Ukrainian people at home and abroad, is what earns this book comparisons to Percival Everett and George Saunders, though it is also entirely unique. A noteworthy literary achievement and also a good story, sure to be widely discussed and enjoyed. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
