Karen Russell is always such a win, every book, every time. Her deep-hearted and deeply weird character studies, this time of the Dust Bowl and those working to literally carve a life, is fascinating, really deeply moving, and of course so, so weird. It's wonderful.

Karen Russell's "The Antidote" is a gripping novel set against the backdrop of the Dust Bowl in Nebraska. The story opens on Black Sunday, as a devastating storm ravages the fictional town of Uz.

Russell weaves together elements of speculative fiction with historical realism. In Uz, there are people known as "Vaults," who can hold the memories of others. The novel explores themes of memory, loss, and the impact of historical events on individual lives. Russell's prose is both lush and sharp, vividly capturing the harshness of the environment and the resilience of its inhabitants. The narrative delves into the ways in which communities cope with both natural disasters and the weight of their shared past, and how individual stories intertwine with the larger historical context.

Historical fiction mixed with magical realism set during the Great Dust Bowl (including real pictures peppered throughout) has made The Antidote one of the most unique books I have read. I am not a usual lover of magical realism but really liked what the author did with it. This book alternates points of view from several characters in the town of Uz, Nebraska. The book starts with a Prairie Witch in the town’s jail as a horrific dust storm blows in. From there the book somehow seamlessly flows through a variety of issues and situations including the dust storm, murders, drought, Native Americans, immigration, secrets, lies, the Great Depression, coverups, colonialism, farming, dreams, survival, and more. This book kept me engaged since I never knew what was coming next. I really liked where the magical realism was able to take the characters and plot. The characters have to deal with a lot of adversity and issues throughout the Antidote until a great rain and flood hit the town at the end of the book. The ending was dramatic and satisfying.

Thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, Karen Russell, and NetGalley for allowing me to read this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Oh, I wanted to love this! I think Russell is an immensely talented writer and her prose style is smart but still accessible. I think many readers will enjoy this book, but I had to push my way through. Too much of the supernatural and even the corporeal elements felt curiously detached. I could not connect on an emotional level with the story or characters, though both are sympathetic and interesting. I will have to peruse other reviews to put a finger on why this one did not work for me.

Something I've been reflecting on a lot lately is how troubles or even catastrophe don't excuse a person from having to take out the trash or pick up milk or pay the water bill. At the same time, they can exist separately from the small victories, like finally beating your partner at Mario Kart, as one random and totally made-up example, even though that little pixilated trophy on the screen means nothing against whatever great sorrow was inflicted in the world during the same span of minutes or hours. It's a strange balance, the banal and the profound, and one that Karen Russell seems to play with in her new novel, The Antidote.

Years into the Dust Bowl, the small Nebraska town of Uz has lost a third of its residents, and counting, as the topsoil continues to blow and the sky stubbornly stays clear of rainclouds—and that's before a whopper of a dust storm nearly blows the rest of town away. In the aftermath of Black Sunday, as it comes to be known, the prairie witch in town, known only as The Antidote, is horrified to realize that all the secrets the townspeople have whispered to her, and ostensibly intended to retrieve when they were ready to face them, have been blown away, too. Outside town, something strange is happening with an old scarecrow standing in a dry field. Its owner, Herb, is none the wiser, though everyone else notices when the wheat surrounding the scarecrow starts to grow. As for his niece, Dell, the basketball championship is coming up, and it looks like Uz's little team of baller-ettes has a shot at winning it.

But Dell has more on her mind, too. There's a hole she's felt yawning inside since the recent murder of her mother, and she fears that means she's turned into a prairie witch herself. Though The Antidote thinks Dell's prospects are blessedly dim for assuming such a tough role, she nonetheless hires Dell on to help her find a way to make up for the lost secrets as the residents of Uz come calling for a bank run of a different kind. Meanwhile, a photographer sent from the government to capture scenes from the Dust Bowl finds her camera is committing more to film than is in front of her lens.

The Antidote is less sprawling than it is multifaceted, though it does both, and mostly to great effect. Though each character narrates in the first person, their voice is distinct enough, not just to avoid confusion, but to sink into their respective narratives of the unfolding story. That immersive experience makes the largely slow pace of the story unfolding a feature, not a bug; each pebble overturned by the toe of a character's shoe brings us a little closer to understanding Uz.

Yet as The Antidote reminds us, there's no understanding a place, or its people, if there is no reconciliation with the most difficult parts of that person or place. The Antidote, and prairie witches like her, keep all the unpleasant things within them so the owner doesn't have to lose sleep over them—and never will, if they don't choose to withdraw those secrets from her. The secret wants and regrets and shames, though, are pieces of their creator, and missing them means missing a piece of that thing of origin. Late in the book, Herb takes a deposit slip left by his father and retrieves the memory from a different prairie witch. What follows is the most heavy-handed part of the narrative, but it's also filled with ideas that refuse to stop being timely. "Better you than me," it's easy to say in situations of inequity—just as easy as it is to forget how fragile our positions of relative privilege can be.

As relevant as that message is for readers of this Dust Bowl tale, so, too, is the theme of the photographer's pictures. The camera shows the landscape—but there's no predicting whether the photos will show it as it is in the present, or the past, or the future. In the many visions of possible futures, the message the camera sends is clear: tomorrow isn't set in stone, and small choices today can radically change how what follows unfolds.

The Antidote is a modern story, and these are certainly points to keep close and hold tight. But it's curious how easily you can imagine them applying to the real people in the Dust Bowl era watching their American Dream literally blow away. Hope and shame aren't two sides to the same coin, but they're two coins that get carried around in the same change a lot. Both can be hard to bear and dangerous in their own way, too. Sometimes it takes both the recklessness of the former and the responsibility of the latter to persevere and make the future better than the past, no matter how bleak the present appears.

This book had such an interesting premise. Set in the Dust Bowl, but with a little bit of magic/occult sprinkled in, it was very well done. We meet "Vaults", who are the receptacles where people unload their unsavory secrets or memories causing trauma and anxiety. They can then come back and retrieve these memories at a later date. However, things start going wrong when this particular town's Vault - Ant - no longer is able to receive the secrets. At times touching, thrilling, and instructive on themes of xenophobia and racism, this was an interesting and definitely well-recommended read. Absolutely recommend this for anyone looking for something different but, at the same time, compelling. This ebook was provided by NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

The Antidote, a historical fiction novel, set in the gloomy, dust bowl of Nebraska. This bleak existence is unsettling as it exposes a serial killer, a prairie witch and town full of secrets. This is a slow-moving, intriguing story. We learn the back-story of its main characters, and the how they came to this place called Uz.

The setting, the writing, reveal a good story in the end. This would be an excellent book club read.

Thank you, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an advance reader's copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I will come back to provide a review when I am able to read the book -- unfortunately, time does not permit me to give this book the attention it deserves.

I'm wondering if I read the same book as everyone else. This one had me bored, confused and frustrated as I had a really hard time following the story. I wish I had gone with my gut and just stopped after the first scene which was very disturbing. Somehow I trudged through the many pov's and different disjointed storylines but never connected to the story or characters. It wasn't for me and I wouldn't recommend it. My thanks to the publisher for providing a digital copy via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

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 <i>Swamplandia!</i> was a good novel, but I didn't expect what we got from <i>The Antidote</i>.) Russell has crafted a beautiful novel, set in the Dust Bowl, about memory, colonialism, and institutional racism, alongside the danger of forgetting and the 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.

3.5 This is a hard one for me to rate and write about. There were so many different facets to this story, and I really did enjoy all the parts. I just don’t know that it fully hit the mark for me personally.

I loved the time period, setting, underlying theme and message. The characters were great and each brought a special perspective to the story. The slight magical elements were well woven into the story and were super interesting.

For the first about 30% I was getting that 5 star feeling. But the longer this went on, the less compelling it became. Some chapters and story lines were necessary for the themes being explored, but not all were able to hold my attention. This was dense and towards the end felt extremely wordier than it needed to me. A little more of a straightforward approach to the end would have been good.

Still left with some questions at the end, but we got a couple sweet endings for our characters.

I received an eARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

What a fantastic book! The first one I have read by this author but definitely can't wait to read more! The characters stay with you long after you finish the book. Highly recommend!

The fictional town of Uz, Nebraska is hit hard with the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935, the event that gave the Dust Bowl its name. The town is covered and crops are failing. The dust storm throws Uz into chaos. The country is already in the Great Depression. The land has been farmed to death, exacerbated by drought. 

Concurrently, women in and around Uz are being murdered and the corrupt/inept/violent sheriff is making things worse. Everybody in Uz is on edge. 

Orphaned basketball playing teenager Dell lives with her uncle Harp, a Polish wheat farmer. A prairie witch, a "vault" who stores the secrets of the community, is our titular Antidote. Photographer Cleo is sent to capture the scene for Roosevelt's New Deal.  There's a cat. There's a scarecrow. This cast narrates the tapestry that is Karen Russell's The Antidote.

This unlikely band of characters comes together in unexpected ways to drive the propulsive narrative. Amidst the bleakness there is hope for the future, as well as a reckoning of the past, primarily Uz's participation in Manifest Destiny. With surrealism, humor, a richly imagined setting and resonating themes, Russell gives the reader a lot to ponder. 

I liked Swamplandia! a lot. The Antidote blew me away. 

My thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for the Advance Reader Copy. (pub date 3/11/2025)

Okay, I'm not going to star-rate this one (where possible) because I didn't even make it 5% of the way through.

Every reader has something they just won't read about, and for me, it's animal cruelty. I'm fine with writers who put it in their work, with readers who don't mind it, even with splatterpunk fans and the like who enjoy violence of this sort. But I can not read it.

Unfortunately, this book by a brilliant and highly celebrated author opens with a grisly scene of violence against animals. This put me off of the rest of the book in a major way. So I stopped reading, for my own peace of mind.

This will be an outlier opinion, no doubt, as the writing is gorgeous. I think this scene may not have affected me so deeply if it were not so perfectly drawn. The opening scene does make a powerful statement about how we bring up boys, and I think that's important.

Thank you to the author Karen Russell, publishers Knopf, and NetGalley for an accessible advance digital copy of THE ANTIDOTE. All views are mine.
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Pulitzer Prize nominee Karen Russell returns with a magic-infused exploration of memory, set in the Nebraska Dust Bowl.

Karen Russell's new novel, The Antidote, is narrated in turns by four main characters. We first meet Antonina Rossi, a prairie witch who functions as a "Vault"—someone who absorbs the memories of others so they can forget past pain or indiscretion. She bills herself as The Antidote ("The Antidote to guilt! The Antidote to sleepless nights!...The Antidote to shame!") and is enormously popular in the small town of Uz, Nebraska, where she's set up shop, particularly with a corrupt sheriff who frequently uses her skills to wipe the memories of prisoners he's abused.

We are then introduced to dryland farmer Harp Oletsky and his fifteen-year-old niece, Asphodel, who has unexpectedly become his responsibility after her mother was murdered. Harp, a lifelong bachelor, is struggling to raise crops during the drought that has plagued the land for years, while simultaneously being baffled by the teenage girl. For her part, the grieving Asphodel feels untethered and pours herself into playing basketball with her high school team.

These characters' lives are upended on Black Sunday—April 14, 1935—by one of the worst dust storms in American history ("The sun sank into black cloud. Buried alive…by the duster to end all dusters," Russell writes). The Antidote's store of memories is suddenly drained, leaving her unable to return her customers' recollections when asked and threatening her livelihood. Harp's life, meanwhile, takes a turn for the better. His parched wheat begins to green up, the air around his property and his home itself are mysteriously free from the dust, and he appears years younger; Asphodel becomes a basketball phenom.

Cleo Allfrey, a Black photographer dispatched by the US government to document conditions in the Dust Bowl (see Beyond the Book), rounds out the cast. Shortly after the storm, she purchases a camera at a local pawn shop and quickly discovers that the images it produces don't depict the present. Sometimes the photos develop into portraits of the past, showing the thriving Pawnee community that once existed on the land; other times, the images that emerge are of the area's possible future. One such picture reveals the shocking truth about a recent crime.

These disparate characters ultimately join forces to expose the sheriff's wrongdoing and free an innocent man unjustly sent to death row. It's a captivating story; part of the fun of the novel is seeing how Russell ties the plotlines together, and the satisfying way she does so is a wonder to behold. The narrative is loaded with tidbits that will please historical fiction readers, and Russell's writing is, as always, exquisite. In an early scene, Antonina observes the dust storm move in while she is incarcerated:

"The Sheriff and his family lived in a two-story brick frame house facing the jail, parts and blueprint purchased from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. It sat on the free side of the property, five hundred yards beyond the bars of my two-foot-by-two-foot window. As the dust blew into my cell, outside things became less and less real. The Sheriff's house slimmed to a charcoal sketch. Erased, redrawn, and finally lost to sight. The sky was well and truly falling."

What makes The Antidote such a marvel, though, is the depth beneath the compelling plot. Russell explores not only environmental issues, but racism, the displacement of Native Americans by government-sponsored settlers, the perceived role of women in 1930s America, and much more. Above all, the book is a study of memory—what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget—and how cultural amnesia can affect future generations.

While I reveled in the novel's complexity, it may be the book's undoing for some readers. Russell packs a huge number of issues into her narrative, and some may feel she's taken on too much. Digressions and flashbacks further complicate the story, some of which may be more or less interesting than others, depending on one's historical knowledge (for example, lengthy passages about the Milford Industrial Home for unmarried pregnant women may not interest those who already know about such institutions). And there are several plot elements that seem nonsensical until the end of the novel, such as an increasingly sentient scarecrow. Once everything is tied together, I suspect the majority of readers will find the book unforgettable, but getting to the end may require a bit of effort.

I was doing so well until I reached the last few chapters of this one, and then I cried a deluge. This is such a beautiful, magical book that sneaks up on your heart and wrings it out, in the best of ways.

The Antidote is epic historical fiction infused with magical realism, set in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The titular character is a 'Prairie Witch:' a woman with the ability to transfer people's memories into her own body so that they may be free of them. We also meet a Polish wheat farmer who learns that a blessing might also be a curse, a government photographer with a time-traveling camera, a basketball star who becomes a witch's apprentice, and a mysterious scarecrow who thinks he might have been human once. An oh yes, a cat who saves the day.

This was such an easy five stars for me. Much was difficult to read: homes for unwed mothers, boarding schools for native children, corrupt law enforcement...but also determined people seeing the possibilities of how things could be.

Thank you so much to Knopf and Netgalley for this book!

The Antidote
By Karen Russell

This is a book about memory: how we store memories – and how we ignore them at our peril. It is told by various narrators. Each chapter is captioned with the name of the narrator of that chapter. This is a good thing, because the author does not manage to give her narrators distinct voices.

The story takes place during the depression as the sandstorms rage through the plains of the mid-west. The Antidote of the title is a so-called Prairie Witch – a woman who can take on memories from others and store them for future retrieval. Almost like a bank vault. The memories can be of happy times the individual wants to preserve; or they can be of bad times that are weighing the individual down. During the memory transfer, the witch is in a trance state and recalls none of the content passed into her or retrieved from her.

This system seems to work well until the witch finds herself not being able to enter her trance and is, in fact, not storing the memories for later return. By losing her trance, she becomes aware of the content of the memories, which puts her at risk.

There are other major players here who all contribute to the part that memory – or lack thereof - plays in life. We see this in the old adage that the victors write history – or those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We see here how the colonizers conveniently forgot the many bad acts they perpetrated in order to extend the country westward.

This book certainly has points to be made. I found it a tough go to get through. If you don't want to do the work to understand what the author is saying, you might want to give this one a pass.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC.

Thanks to NetGalley for this eARC!

Wow, there's a lot of I want to say about this book. I fell in love with Karen Russell's writing a couple years ago and was mesmerized by her writing and the stories she told. When I first started reading the book, it took me a while to get in the full swing of reading it. I had to stop and start many times (I'm not sure if it was because of my current reading slump). However, once I really got into the book, the story moved along and I was totally immersed in it. I thought this was a brilliant new book by Russell and I loved the mixture of magical realism and historical fiction. It worked out well, and I highly recommend this book.

1.5 stars

This book just wasn’t for me. I powered through the animal death at the first few points of view hoping the elegant prose would win out. Other readers will probably like it, but so many characters had nearly the same voice. There is a LOT of story here; for me, too much. It tried to weave so many issues together including climate change, generational trauma and colonization. Oh I didn’t even tell you about the basketball chapters, magical realism or pictures did I? Yes all in one book; never really coming together for me. Though I think I have a new insult, “this rat-gnawed corncob of a man”

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for an advanced copy to form opinions from.

Karen Russell is simply one of the best writers around..

In The Antidote, the story takes us back to Uz, Nebraska, during the Dustbowl. Perfectly imagined magical realism is a hallmark of Russell's writing and it's beautifully done here. The Prairie Witch, who goes by the name The Antidote has taken on the burden of her neighbors' troubled memories for more than a decade. When these memories start to go missing, the entire small town is wrapped up in the story, bringing us memorable characters, a gorgeously drawn out backdrop, and a story that will have you thinking about it for weeks after you're done reading.