Endling presents the concept of national identity as multifaceted and fluid, using the core cast to explore the question of whether identity is inherent or performative. Characters in Reva’s novel consciously adopt and discard roles—the ideal bride, the reclaimed native, the radical activist—to navigate social expectations, manipulate others, or escape their pasts. All of these roles intrinsically interact with their lives as Ukrainians, a cultural identity that some seek to abandon while others try to regain. This constant reinvention suggests that while constructed identities can be powerful tools for survival or self-discovery, they can also become prisons that obscure or erase an authentic self, demonstrating the fraught process of defining oneself, particularly when one’s community faces the risk of eradication.

The most explicit construction of Ukrainian identity occurs within the international marriage industry. To succeed in the romance tours, sisters Nastia and Sol fabricate a Ukrainian “dream woman” designed to appeal to the stereotypical desires of Western bachelors, a performance they use to scam the men for money. Yeva performs the role of a “bride” in the same tours. She despises the role but undertakes it as a pragmatic means to fund her mobile snail conservation lab. For both Yeva and the sisters, identity becomes a form of labor, a calculated performance enacted for material gain, highlighting the inauthenticity inherent in such transactional systems. Within this structure, they have no ability to explore their national identity in earnest, particularly given the sexism within it. Yeva feels there is no place for her in Ukrainian society as an asexual woman, and her conviction demonstrates how women face alienation from their heritage on both external and internal battlegrounds.

Identity is also portrayed as a site of personal struggle and reclamation, particularly for characters caught between cultures. Pasha arrives in Ukraine as “Paul,” an “anglicized” Canadian engineer who feels disconnected from his heritage. His journey is a conscious effort to shed this “paltry Paul self” and reclaim a Ukrainian identity he feels was stolen from him when his family emigrated (79), despite knowing that his parents assimilated to the West in the hopes of securing a more stable, flourishing lifestyle for him. He adopts his birth name, Pasha, and later the more formal “Pavlo,” and his attempts to perform this new identity evolve from awkward efforts to speak Russian to becoming an embodied activist leading protests in occupied Kherson. His performance of a reclaimed identity gradually becomes his reality, demonstrating that these cultural connections are within reach for those who value and pursue them. However, this form of connection becomes more easily available to a male member of the diaspora than it does for the women who have spent their lives there.

The novel presents the most extreme subversion of identity as a form of total escape. The once-infamous activist Iolanta Cherno, known for her public, body-centric protests, completely erases her past to become “Mrs. Brown,” a suburban American housewife and HOA president. This retreat into anonymity acts as an effort to escape an identity that had become an unbearable prison. Tying her sense of self to the liberation of Ukrainian women left her with no room for individuality or the pursuit of her personal desires, so she saw no other option but to abandon her place and family in Ukraine entirely. Becoming an idealized American wife further emphasizes the loss of Ukrainian culture within Western dominance. Reva doesn’t present Iolanta’s desire for individual comfort or fulfilment as condemnable; rather, her actions are absorbed into the broader grief of a specific community and its traditions, spurred in large part by outside commodification from the West and invasion by Russia. In total, Reva presents the relationship with one’s communal identity as perpetually complicated by both external threats and internal, individual needs.