The Antidote
A Novel
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4.2 • 71 Ratings
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- $12.99
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The spellbinding latest from Russell (Swamplandia!) infuses a Dust Bowl epic with gothic melodrama. It takes place in 1935 Uz, Neb., where farms have been ruined by a never-ending drought. Many of the residents visit Antonina Rossi, a "prairie witch" who keeps their darkest secrets as part of an occult tradition, advertising her services as an "Antidote to guilt" and other ailments. Among her clients are Harp Oletsky, whose parents emigrated from Poland in 1872 and stood by on their Nebraska homestead while the Pawnee people were driven off their land. After Antonina's memory is wiped clean by the famous Black Sunday dust storm, she meets Harp's niece Dell Oletsky, a 15-year-old basketball phenom whose mother, Lada, has been recently murdered. White hobo Clemson Louis Dew is wrongly convicted of Lada's murder along with several others, and Antonina and Dell band together with Cleo Allfrey, a Black New Deal photographer, to prove Dew is being framed by the corrupt local sheriff. The author's imagination is on full display as she conjures a legacy of prairie witches and depicts the magical qualities of Cleo's camera, which captures the past and future. There's even a sentient scarecrow who bears witness to the dust storms and violence. At the heart of the narrative is the Oletsky family's reckoning with their complicity in the Pawnee people's displacement. It's an inspired and unforgettable fusion of the gritty and the fantastic.
Customer Reviews
Many parallels currently
Prose that encompass civility between humanity and nature. Parallels politically. Confirmation that the universe has strange and wondrous events that balance the scales against hopeless as long as we stand together against wickedness and indifference. Thank you for this read.