In Karen Russell's imagined Dust Bowl-era Nebraska, prairie witches serve as "vaults" for people's memories - a type of confession, but one in which the memories are stored out of the individual's mind until they care to retrieve them. An incredible dust storm rises, and one vault goes bust, empty of all stored memories. Russell has a way of spinning characters that are complex, likeable, and realistic, even when they are magically so. The interactions between characters are wonderful. Suspense is high as we learn more about the death of one main character's mother and other women in the area. There's a lot going on in this novel, but Russell keeps track of the thread holding it all together.

This novel blended together several historical elements in a fresh way, infusing them with a touch of magical realism that kept the overall story from feeling too heavy.
While I did enjoy this blending and the characters included in the story, the last twenty percent began to feel repetitive, as characters were telling other characters things that had already been revealed to the reader.
Overall, a solid historical fiction.

An excellent mix of historical fiction, climate change fiction, and magical realism. No one write an immersive novel as good as Karen Russell and I will be thinking about this for a long time.

My library book club will be reading this book in August.

The Antidote is beautifully written--one of those books where I had to force myself to stop highlighting because there was more highlights than not. It is told from a multitude of perspectives--not all of them human. Or even animate.

The story takes place in rural Nebraska during the time of the dust bowls in depression-era America. Although the opening feels like a upernatural horror movie, it turns out that it is based on an actual event: "Black Sunday" when a dust storm destroyed houses and farms, killing people and animals. The feeling conveyed is of a claustrophobic terror--I could feel the dust and the fear. As the dust storms settle, we meet the inhabitants of the (fictional) town of Uz.

One of our narrators is Asphodel (Del), a 14 year old who has come to live with her uncle after her mother was murdered. She is the captain of her school basketball team and her fierce determination to win translates into an equally fierce determination to survive. The Antidote is a witch--and here the book enters the supernatural realm, where it will continuously wander around the edges and sometimes straight into the heart of.

Then we have Cleo Alfrey, an African-American photographer who has come out to the farming community as part of a New Deal grant. Her dream of achieving artistic and commercial success, But her artistic vision goes beyond what the people who sent her want, and her subjects seem to be making demands on her.

I often forgot about the supernatural elements in the story since I was so caught up in the emotional lives of the characters. But they are unavoidable--beginning with the witch who takes "deposits" from troubled people--who pour their memories into her until they feel able to make a "withdrawal" and deal with them.

The writing moves seamlessly through lyrical writing, emotional revelations, and an intensely suspenseful ending. I was surprised to find myself unexpectedly moved to tears several times and to fear at others.

The primary theme of the book is memory--as symbolized in the witch's holding of unwanted memories, we see how an entire civilization is struggling with the same issues. How it chooses to forget the trauma it has inflicted on others--the people living on the land that were dispossessed and often slaughtered when the "settlers" arrived. This "political" issue is enacted not through preaching but in the best possible writing of individuals struggling with their own memories and pasts and dawning realizations of what they have done, often without allowing themselves conscious awareness of their actions.

A wonderful, thought-provoking work that also is emotionally satisfying and evocative.

The Antidote will be published March 11 2025 by Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf. I thank the publisher, NetGalley and the author for providing me with a copy of this ebook.

Spanish philosopher George Santayana is credited with saying, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This belief may be the central theme of Karen Russell's The Antidote. Another related theme is purposefully forgetting or depositing one's memories in a vault so that life can proceed without dealing with or learning from historical events.

The Antidote is set in a fictional Nebraska town called Uz while FDR was president in 1935. The main story takes place roughly between two disasters that struck the people of this region: Black Sunday, one of the most catastrophic dusters during the Dust Bowl, and the Republican River Flood. Uz is an allusion to Oz, the magical land that does not quite deliver its promises. In The Antidote, a group of Polish immigrants received large tracts of land to farm and seek the American dream. Although they had been forced from their homeland because of oppression, few honored the Native Americans they had oppressed to obtain their land.

Karen Russell's novel includes multiple characters' viewpoints, one of which is Antonina Rossi, who, before Black Sunday, had been the vault to the townspeople, allowing them to deposit their memories and withdraw them if they wanted. She was known in Uz as the Prairie Witch and the Antidote. She lost her superpowers on Black Sunday and was soon to be exposed for the fraud she was. The Antidote's addresses her narration to her son, who was taken from her at birth at a cruel, abusive home for unwed mothers. She is the quintessential, disparaged outsider "woman" who is a mother. Although the reader knows about her motherhood from the book's early chapters, she does not reveal it to the other storytellers until later in the novel. There are multiple nuanced messages for modern readers in the descriptors and actions of the Antidote.

Another storyteller whose viewpoint is essential to the overall story is Asphodel (Dell) Oletsky, named after a flower, and living with her Uncle Harp Oletsky in Uz after her mother was brutally murdered. Dell is a rising basketball star on a local team that becomes known as The Dangers after Black Sunday. Dell and her uncle, another storyteller, have differences in lifestyle and personality, but both have a love for the murdered mother, Harp's sister. Both also struggle with good and evil. When the Oletsky wheat farm is the only one spared after the infamous Black Sunday dusting, we realize how magical realism and supernatural intervention play a role in the development of the plot.

The government sent New Deal Black photographer Cleo Allfrey to document the Dust Bowl in Nebraska. Cleo's descriptions of the people and land differ from those of the primarily white townspeople, and her narration contributes to the themes of what is real and what is counterfeit. Cleo's Graflex camera has the magical ability to show past and present. With her unusual camera and her outsider status, she is instrumental in exposing the inaccuracies believed and perpetuated by local town leaders since the Polish settlers took the land from the Natives. Of course, her presence in this novel highlights the injustices of the United States government that continue today. Uz is but a microcosm of the country where the people ignore the value of the Natives, persecute non-Europeans, and continually repeat the mistakes of the past.

Other narrators include a scarecrow and a cat. They further the analogy to the fable of the Wizard of Oz and figure prominently as the story progresses. While The Wizard of Oz provided commentary on political, economic, and social events of America in the late 1800s, The Antidote is a modern parable that uses the atrocities of Manifest Destiny and the Dust Bowl as its basis but is clearly speaking about modern times. It is a cautionary tale about how Americans cannot choose to erase the ugly memories. Government officials, throughout the history of the United States have used rhetoric and euphemism to deny and rationalize the treatment of the disenfranchised. In 2025, when this novel is published, our country continues to face far-reaching consequences of questionable actions over the past years.

This story was an interesting story from an author I don’t know or haven’t read before! Will look at finding other things by this author. I am grateful for the early access, thank you to those that allowed it!

mean, it's Karen Russell; of course, it will be a 5-star read.

Set in the fictional Nebraska town of Uz, "The Antidote" is a Dust Bowl story. It's also a story about memory, human nature, racism, bodily autonomy, and the criminal justice system. With three MAIN narrators (and a few others interspersed throughout), we follow a Polish farmer who has the only viable wheat crop, his orphan's niece who is a basketball player and maybe something else, and The Prairie Witch, a vault of secrets.

With Karen Russell, a bit of magical realism is included. This tale includes a sentient scarecrow and a photographer with a camera that might be from The Twilight Zone. Ultimately, this is a story about memories. Those from the past, those that we don't ever want to forget and the ones we do, and the hopes of memories of the future.

The Antidote is just a beautifully written story.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

One of the worst storms of the Dust Bowl swept across an immense part of the United States on April 14, 1935. The storm moved an estimated 300 million tons of topsoil in a matter of hours. Karen Russell’s strange, affecting, new novel, The Antidote opens with the Black Sunday Storm. Storms feature heavily in this book. They scour away the past. They wash the present away, too. The storms leave so little behind that the only way to go on is to rebuild everything from the ground up.

The dust of Black Sunday in the opening chapter clears to reveal our primary trio of narrators: an angry teenager, a dour farmer, and a miserable prairie witch. We also hear from the most mysterious character, a scarecrow who doesn’t know who he is or why he’s a scarecrow in a wheat field. Another narrator—a photographer hired by the federal government to document the Dust Bowl—emerges a little later. The first character we meet is the Antidote herself, a prairie witch with the ability to take away people’s memories and magically store them for later retrieval. The witch, or Vault as she sometimes calls herself, never knows what people deposit with her. She’s in a trance the whole time. Thanks to the Antidote, the people of Uz, Nebraska, can forget whatever they don’t care to carry around in their brains. Unfortunately for the Antidote, the local sheriff has learned to use her to his advantage. Meanwhile, teenaged Asphodel and her melancholy uncle, Harp Oletsky, are learning to live together at the family farm. Dell had to come live with her uncle after her mother’s murder and now spends most of her time fiercely playing basketball with Uz’s girls’ team. Later, Cleo Allfrey arrives in Uz to take pictures, only to stumble upon something strange going on with the land in and around Uz.

There is a lot going on in The Antidote—some of it very tragic—but themes start to emerge across the chapters. After Black Sunday, Harp finds himself on an inexplicable lucky streak. He’s only farmer who is able to get a crop to grow in his fields and is very surprised to find himself suddenly elected as the head of the local grange. All of this is so baffling that he spends a lot of his time, out in his wheat field, trying to figure out how he came to be here, in this place. Scratching at his memories dredges up long-forgotten memories about the Pawnee who used to call this land home, until American settlers pushed them further and further away. At the same time, the Antidote discovers that the Black Sunday storm has somehow erased all of the memories she’s held in trust for so long. She has to fake her magic with the assistance of Dell, who badgers the older woman into taking her on as an apprentice in order to make money to support her basketball team. Being around Dell has the Antidote looking back to her own past, at the abuse and pain that turned her into a Vault. All of these characters, including Cleo, are forced to contemplate the way we forget or rewrite our histories. We like to think of the past as fixed but it’s a lot more volatile than we realize.

So much happens in The Antidote that I am barely scratching the surface here. In fact, I wish that I had read the book more slowly than I did, so that I could sit and spend more time ruminating on the characters’ memories and revelations. I was so hooked by all of the plots going on that I couldn’t stop reading. I had to know if the Antidote would ever be able to expose the monstrous sheriff and if Dell was going to win her season and if Cleo would be able to take a picture that truly captured what life was like out on the dusty, impoverished heartland of Nebraska. Most of all, I had to know what was going on with the scarecrow. I feel like The Antidote is going to become one of those books that I keep returning to, that I can reread many times and always find something new to think about. This book is truly extraordinary.

WOW this was really well done. a bunch of pieces that come together told by a series of narrators including a prairie witch, a wheat farmer, his niece (a basketball player), a photographer, and many others. 5 stars. tysm for thea rc.

I absolutely love Karen Russell's ability to create a work that is at once so well-researched and also so fantastic. It is a kind of magic power she has. This is her best book yet.

At first, I was hesitant to pick up a book that takes place in Nebraska during the Dust Bowl, but I trust Russell. This book was way more than historical fiction though. There are prairie witches, murders, and a mysterious scarecrow among other things. The story also feels like it is saying something bigger about social justice and collective memory at a time where that seems incredibly important.

This book was absolutely amazing, and I'm excited to put it in the hands of readers looking for recommendations.

An ambitious and sweeping novel thats zooms in on a specific moment in time in American history by spotlighting small town Nebraska 1930s. The cast of characters is vivid and richly developed. The setting is alive and almost ominous. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time - recommend!

This is classically Karen Russell: a misfit teen protagonist surrounded by misfit adults in a slightly sinister time/place, all of them reckoning with the past. I love Karen Russell, and I think she’s at her best in short stories. Her novels tend to sprawl a bit, and this definitely does. The second half, as all the separate POVs begin to pull together, feels just a little baggy. By then, I cared about these characters and I genuinely wanted to know how she’d end this story, because I wasn’t sure I saw a way out.

I love historical fiction that expands and challenges the stories we think we know. This definitely does that. I can see some readers might find Russell’s story to be preachy. But I found the extended metaphor of a human vault to store the things we cannot take to be very effective. And moving.

Ultimately, this is a story about how people survive.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy.

The novel captures an era of American history that I knew nothing about: the story is nestled between two major climate events—the Black Sunday Dust Storm and the Republican River Flood. The book is filled with an eclectic cast of characters: a prairie witch called the Antidote, who can act as a vault for people's memories, which they can later debit; Harp Oletsky (a Polish farmer) and his defiant but lovable niece, Asphodel, who signs up to become the Antidote’s apprentice; Cleo Allfrey, a photographer who stumbles upon a camera that can take quantum pictures—pictures that reveal the past and future; a sentient scarecrow; a vengeful cat; and a twisted sheriff. In the aftermath of the Dust Bowl, the photographs Cleo captures and the memories stored in the vaults begin to uncover dark secrets not just about present-day events, but also about how the town was founded and the hidden truths behind its establishment—secrets the community is ill-prepared to face. This mounting tension ignites the action that drives the story forward. While the book excels at painting vivid, evocative portraits of the Dust Bowl, the dust storms, and the sweeping prairies, it truly shines in weaving together its eclectic cast of characters, culminating in a breathtaking, hopeful finale.

The book explores the heavy burden of memories, showing how, in their quest for self-preservation, people may choose to bury their pasts—only to have those dark, unresolved memories inevitably resurface and haunt them. It also explores how settlers/colonizers drove Native Indians from their lands through treachery, violence, and fraud, and coerced them into assimilation by stripping them of their Indian roots. The book shows how everything is connected: the ripple effects of drought-like conditions and intense soil erosion stem from the fact that Native Americans, who knew how to care for the land, were driven out. It explores the settler mentality, showing how seemingly "small" prejudices and rumors can lead to far-reaching consequences.

There are also parallel threads about the Antidote’s grief over having her son stolen at a school for “unwed mothers”, Asphodel finding hope and community in basketball amidst the death of her mother, Cleo finding her own voice in her photography—especially as a Black woman during a time when racial segregation was still rampant, even in integrated communities—and Harp making sense of his fortune (his land being unscathed) while his neighbors reel from the crushing damages of the Dust Bowl. The novel also explores the fickleness of the justice system, mob mentality, and the hypocrisy of “religious people.” The book manages to tackle all these seemingly disparate threads with aplomb.

The book also includes an author’s note and historical context at the end, shedding light on the real people and events that inspired the narrative—an insight I found incredibly valuable. I absolutely loved this book, and it will undoubtedly be one of my favorites of the year.

Thank you to Netgalley, the author (Karen Russell), and the publisher (Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf) for an advanced copy. Thoughts and review are completely my own.

(Will be sharing to my Instagram closer to the publishing date)

This book opens in a small town in Nebraska called Uz on Black Sunday as a huge dust storm covers the town and its inhabitants. The Great Depression and the drought are driving residents away along with something else. The Antidote follows a cast of characters including a "prairie witch" who can use her body as a "vault" to hold secrets and memories, a Polish farmer whose wheat fields are inexplicably growing while everyone else's are failing, the farmer's niece and apprentice to the witch and a New Deal photographer. These characters deal with hardship, grief, historical wrongs, environmental catastrophes, and the town sheriff in this wide ranging book.

This book had a great cover and interesting premise with the magical realism mixed with historical backdrop. My previous experience with this author was less than favorable as I did not care for her collection of short stories but I was willing to give another chance. In The Antidote, I thought she wrote interesting characters but this book was way too long. It felt like a bunch of short stories loosely tied together and it took a long time to get going. I rarely give up on books but I was really close on this one as the book doesn't really get moving until over 2/3 of the way through. Your patience is rewarded with a somewhat confusing climax involving some things that aren't well explained. On the whole, I enjoyed the book but it tested my patience and wasn't always clear how the magical realism aspect of things worked.

Swamplandia, the year it was released, got robbed of the Pulitzer. It should have won. This book, in my opinion, should also be in the running to win her a prize.

Something of a mixed bag, this one. Firstly, it’s likely to appeal more if you’re a fan of magical realism. I’m not. So I struggled with magic cameras, and witches with the ability to record and drain memories, and inspirited scarecrows, and more. And then there’s the worthiness angle, the important conversation about displacement and Native Americans and despoliation of the land. Serious stuff, but verging on the didactic here, I thought. On the other hand, the writing is often bright and vivid, with lots of nice touches.
Does it add up to an integrated whole? Not really. It’s a long book with high ambitions that requires more suspension of disbelief - and patience - than most. I applaud the ambitiousness but am not sure it has resulted in success.

I was excited to read this when I saw that Karen Russell had a new novel coming out—but I was unprepared for how much I would love it. (I thought "Swamplandia!" was a good novel, but I didn't expect what we got from "The Antidote". Russell has crated a beautiful novel, set in the Dust Bowl, about memory, colonialism, institutional racism, and the danger (and power) in envisioning a better world.

I am a sucker for historical fiction with magical elements, and this one executes the magic without flaw. We have a world that is familiar, with a magical overlay that draws stronger connections to our present. It's exactly what I want when I'm reading an alternate history—basis in fact where the magic rules add to our understanding of the present.

Some of the pacing at the end gets a little squirrelly, but I found myself flipping pages to find out how our characters made it through. Really loved this novel.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

So much is included in this historical fiction/magical realism novel that I felt overwhelmed and in awe. The author includes topics like government lies, a home for unwed mothers, immigration, bad farming practices, removing the Native Peoples from their homes, murder, basketball, racism, a New Deal photography project, epic weather conditions, and a wonderful invention called “prairie witches” who would listen to and carry your emotional burdens for you. Her descriptions of the winds that blew incessantly had me itching my own eyes in sympathy. She peopled her story with likable, flawed, caring characters that are so perfect for the time and place.

Thanks to NetGalley and Alfred A Knopf Publishing for the ARC to read and review.

Thank you for the opportunity to review "The Antidote" by Karen Russell. Russell has been a favorite short story author for a while now and I'm appreciative of her work on this latest release. "The Antidote" is a solid work and I enjoyed most of it very much. Definitely will recommend to others and will keep reading Russell in the future.

was hooked by the bookjacket copy immediately. This novel sounded ambitious by the description, alone, and it was. But Russel nailed it – this book with its fantastical, magical, historical, environmental, and social themes.

Who wouldn’t be intrigued by a Dust Bowl-era story containing ‘prairie witches’ who serve as ‘memory vaults’ for human emotion? Or a teenaged female basketball player damaged by loss, living with her lonely uncle? Or a female Black photographer hired to document the sadness playing out in the dust-ravaged Midwest by the Resettlement Administration? And a magical camera!

And my goodness – the aspect the bookjacket doesn’t tell you: there’s a cat who ends up playing a very pivotal role in this climax of this story (with a hilarious sense of humor). And the scarecrow. Delightful.

Told in multiple first-person voices, this novel is filled with beautiful writing and thought-provoking one-liners.

A stupid man can still be a savant at torture.

The dust had another lesson to teach me: so long as you’re still drawing breath, there’s always more to lose.

‘You should be grateful’ is a sentence that the powerful wield like a cudgel.

It’s rarely the truth itself that people can’t accept. It’s how they feel about it.

But that is a sight that will never leave me. The waves of earth crashing over the prairie. The sky exhaling her birds.

The windmills were swinging sunset around and around. Tin blue and fiery pinks and golds.

This book tackles some of the stark realities of the founding of our country (as well as its mistreatment of women), and includes many harrowing scenes depicted with great sensitivity. And while it begs many questions about property ownership, colonial culpability, guilt, and the lies we tell ourselves – it does paint hope for a different future. The best part is that, unlike so many other novels in this era, Russell doesn’t come across as sermonizing.

This wasn’t a perfect book. Some might find it too ambitious, or too slow (something I don’t mind, if I’m transported and learning something new, and if the language is lovely). What stopped this from being a five-star read was the rushed decision of all the characters that led to the pivotal scene. I couldn’t one-hundred-percent buy their sudden convictions, though I was happy to go along with them because of the hubbub that was caused.

In the end, this is a book about the importance of our life stories – the emotions, lies, truths, and difficulties within them – the very things that make us imperfect beings. But beings who are capable of change. And, it is, of course, this is a book about family.