Endling

Reva’s astonishingly imaginative tale is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Start with a send-up of the Ukrainian mail-order bride industry. Add a scientist passionate about snails, who travels the country in her RV lab trying to save species on the brink of extinction. Weave in two sisters staging a kidnapping stunt designed to get the attention of their estranged activist mother. But with the stage thus set, the Russians invade (exactly as they did in real life) and the plot … stops. Reva herself enters the story for conversations with her editor. Next a puzzlingly placed acknowledgements section appears mid-book. And then Reva takes us in an entirely different direction. Readers open to surprise and a superb (and superbly absurd) meta tale will relish this wickedly sharp tale of loss, absence, and reality crashing our carefully constructed plans.