The Antidote
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town
“Achingly gorgeous. . . . Karen Russell is one of our most humane and generous writers; this book is as profound as it is wonderfully strange.” —Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds
The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.
Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Secrets, lies, and buried histories haunt a small town in this remarkable work of historical magical realism. In Depression-era Nebraska, the small town of Uz is scarred by its violent past and devastated by drought. Prairie witch Antonina makes a living absorbing people’s memories, but she’s just lost her powers. Basketball-loving teenage orphan Dell becomes Antonina’s apprentice with a plan to help. Meanwhile, a traveling Black photographer buys a camera that takes images of the past and potential futures, a sentient scarecrow keeps watch, and a pregnant cat seeks revenge. Swamplandia! author Karen Russell’s prose is rich and evocative, painting a desolate landscape brimming with strange magic. Intertwining history with the supernatural dust bowl devastation, The Antidote becomes a story about resilience, the unjust treatment of Native Americans, white privilege, and stark warnings about the current climate emergency. These beautifully crafted characters are simultaneously confronting their town’s shameful past and trying to carve out a sustainable future. The results are powerful, evocative, and unexpectedly relatable.
