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.

It has been fourteen years since Russell’s last novel Swamplandia, and it feels like she poured the entire decade and a half into this book. This is a mix of historical fiction and magic realism set in Uz Nebraska, during the Great Depression and in the aftermath of a historically violent dust storm. When you read Marquez or Borges you can feel the tropic sweat on your brow, and that heat and humidity fits well into the slightly off kilter worlds they write about. In the Antidote you can taste the dust, feel the grime stuck in your eye, and the desolation breeds the bizarre things they discuss. The Antidote is the name of a Prairie Witch who serves a vault for the memories of other people, and we follow her, her apprentice an orphaned teenage girl, the girls uncle who’s farmland was mysteriously spared, and a new deal farmer whose camera can see the future. It isn’t a breezy read, it is real deal literary fiction. Russell is a master, her writing is needle sharp, and the book has stuck to me ever since I finished it, like the film of grime which covers Uz.

The Antidote is a sweeping tale that merges historical fiction with magical realism. The book begins with the devastating Black Sunday dust storm which devastated the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. A town that is already coping with the Great Depression and the Dust bowl. It is a bleak place where a "Prairie Witch" serves as a vault to people's memories and secrets. The other characters are made up of a Polish farmer and his niece, a new Deal photographer, a basketball player and witch's apprentice.

If you have read one of Karen Russel's books, you are familiar with her writing, her use of magical realism in her stories, and how her books evoke emotion and are thought-provoking. The Antidote utilizes the climate issues to touch on memory, forgetting whether willfully or not, consequences, history, nature, loss, learning, and possibilities.

This book is both slow moving and intriguing. While I struggle with slow books, I found that I was able to go with the flow of this one. This book has a strong social justice message. Some will enjoy this some might not. It will depend on what you enjoy in books. My favorite character was the "Prairie Witch”. I enjoyed her sections the most. What shines in this book is the author's writing.

In the midst of the Great Depression, an extreme dust storm descends on Uz, Nebraska. Not only does it wipe out any inkling of a crop, but it devours the memories of prairie witches. Prairie witches, also known as vaults, store memories for people who don't want to be burdened by them. A person who makes a deposit immediately feels lighter, relieved of the heavy load. As the dust bowl ravages the area, people flee, and they want to retrieve their deposits from The Antidote, Uz's prairie witch. But The Antidote's vault is empty. Fortunately, local teen Asphodel Oletsky knows much about the town from listening in on the party line. She helps The Antidote plant new memories when customers show up to collect their deposits. Unfortunately, Sheriff Iscoe still uses The Antidote for deposits, against her will. But she can't go into her trance anymore and knows the memories people are depositing.

A reflection on memory and what it means to acknowledge the past and take responsibility for our roles tinged with the supernatural set in a harrowing time in history.

Karan Russell's latest novel, The Antidote, is a masterful blend of historical fiction and magical realism set in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, during the Dust Bowl drought. Russell's signature style of fantastical realism is evident throughout the book, which explores themes of memory, loss, and hope.

The story follows five compelling characters, including the Prairie Witch, whose body acts as a vault for neighbors to deposit their most heinous memories. This unique concept results in a town of spellbound amnesiacs with holes where their memories once resided. Other notable characters include a Polish wheat farmer whose farm miraculously survives the dust storm, his orphaned niece who is both a basketball star and an apprentice to the Prairie Witch, a scarecrow infused with human thought, and a New Deal photographer whose camera reveals hidden truths and future possibilities.

Russell's prose is both beautiful and evocative, painting a vivid picture of life in Uz, Nebraska, under challenging conditions. Her descriptions of nature as a force are particularly striking, allowing readers to truly immerse themselves in the setting. The touches of magical realism, such as the Prairie Witch's memory vault and the photographer's magical camera, add depth and intrigue to the storytelling.

The novel also addresses important social justice issues, including the environment, colonialism, the mistreatment of unwed mothers, and the injustices faced by the Sioux Indians. These themes are woven seamlessly into the narrative, creating a powerful and thought-provoking read.
The Antidote is a profound and transformative book that will leave readers filled with hope and a new perspective on memory. Overall, The Antidote is a beautifully written and deeply moving novel that showcases Karan Russell's talent for blending historical fiction with magical realism.

It is a must-read for fans of the genre and anyone looking for a thought-provoking and emotionally resonant story.

It has been more than a decade since Russell’s well-received debut, Swamplandia!, the story of Florida alligator wranglers that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. She makes a triumphant return with The Antidote, a story that is set in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska (Uz, the town where Job lived in the Bible or a play on Oz?) after the market collapse in 1929 and during the ensuing drought years. Russell focuses on a handful of primary characters – Antonia, a prairie witch, who goes by the name “The Antidote” that she lifted from an ad for Pauline’s Panacea (“The Antidote to All that Ails You”). She advertises her “banking services” as a “panacea for every ailment from heartburn to nightmares,” by absorbing and storing her customers’ troubled memories; however, fifteen years of those memories that she was charged with preserving have mysteriously gone the way of the topsoil. Asophodel “Dell” Oletsky is a plucky fifteen year old who was shipped to Uz to live with her late mother’s brother, Harp Oletsky. Dell “was only alive to play basketball.” She was the star point guard of the team sponsored by Poultry & Eggs, until it had to discontinue its sponsorship because its owner had gone bust. To raise money for the team to travel to the championships, Dell prevails on the prairie witch to be her apprentice. As people pull up stakes to leave Uz, including the basketball coach, Dell is able to assist the disabled witch by fabricating “shiny new memories” to replace those missing from the Vault. Harp Oletsky is Dell’s shy bachelor uncle whose wheat fields curiously survived the Black Sunday blizzard; he is the only wheat farmer in three counties to make a good crop. Rounding out the principal cast is Cleo Allfrey, a Black New Deal photographer tasked with documenting Americana whose lens captures the past and the future.

In a town of only 200, the novel has an expansive sweep. Russell widens the aperture to zoom in more tightly on her characters and their community. Antonia fell in love with Giancarlo, a polio survivor and, when she became pregnant at fifteen, her guardian, Giancarlo’s mother, shipped her to the Milford Home for Unwed Mothers where she gave birth to a son whom she was falsely told had died during childbirth. Dell’s “pathetic drunk” mother had run off with a swindler and was one of several women to have been murdered by the Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Killer, who was later identified as Clemson Louis Dew, a gentle boy who had been hopping trains and following the harvest and whose electrocution was botched by the Black Sunday duster. Dew was railroaded by the corrupt sheriff Isco (whose wife perches on the party line and collects horror stories) whose bid for reelection caused him to fabricate evidence (and dispose of an inconvenient corpse). Russell addresses themes like the environment (Harp recognized that the community’s heedless farming practices led to the erosion of the topsoil, lamenting that the “soil rose in mutiny against the farmer”), and the historical whitewashing of the theft of Native American land.

Russell has crafted a gripping historical tale that is full of wonder (there are chapters narrated by a scarecrow and an anthropomorphized cat), but she maintains command of the narrative, never letting it become silly. This is a wondrous novel that is full of heart and humor with bittersweet undertones. Thank you Knopf and Net Galley for an advanced copy of this charmed tale that I thoroughly enjoyed and will recommend without hesitation.

Set during the Dust Bowl in a small Nebraska town, five characters struggle to set their lives straight after a massive storm. An interesting mix of historical fiction and magical realism this book explores memory, history, and social constructs. It was a little hard for me to follow all the different POVs at points, but overall, this is a very good book with a lot to think about.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf Publishing for providing me with an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Available March 11, 2925

The Antidote by Karen Russell was a no go for me. I found it a slog and I have several reasons: I don’t particularly like stream of consciousness and much of this was. I don’t care for magic, even the minuscule amount found in this book although I did find the concept of off-loading memories an intriguing one. The general topic was sound: the Depression era and the Dust Bowl that occurred in much of the bread bowl of the country. Characters were good and growth was shown so that is a plus. All-in-all, I don’t feel like the time spent on this very long book was time well-spent. I do recognized that some of the fault is mine.

I was invited to read The Antidote by Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage and Anchor. All thoughts and opinions are mine. #Netgalley #KnopfPantheonVintageAndAnchor #KarenRussell #TheAntidote

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher allowing me to have an eARC of this book!
I have really enjoyed Russell's Short Stories and her Novella Sleep Donation in the past.
I am so sad to say I only enjoyed the first half of this book and around the last 20%.
It seemed like there was a clear beginning and ending plotted out, but that the middle got a little muddied.
I am not usually a reader of Historical and Lit Fic, so this may have been a case of me fitting more with the fantastical side of Russell's writing.
The Antidote, in my opinion, is heavy historical. Its a lot of historical facts meshed with fictional characters, who also have a sprinkle of magical realism. Especially with perspectives given from a Scarecrow and a Cat.
I felt that there were too many viewpoints. I really wanted to stay on The Antidote's viewpoint the most because it felt the strongest, plus it's the name of the book. Cleo Allfrey was interesting with her magical realism element that was later discovered in the book. I almost feel like as a reader of Russell's short stories these characters could have each had their own novella. They do interact as we get further in the novel, but I think I enjoyed the first half because everyone was separate. Then I enjoyed the random Cat perspective in the last 10% because it reminded me of the parts of Russell's short stories that I found interesting.
We also find out that a platonic teenager friendship turns into a romance and I didn't enjoy the sexualization of a teenager. The moments of intimacy in this books are explained through a lyrical sense, but it was still uncomfortable for me. This should also be tagged LGBTQ, because I think there is a reader audience for that and would help for marketing to the correct readership.
I have loved Russell's shorter form books, so I think this is one that is just not for me. I am disappointed because I felt like it was a 5 star going in and it ended up being way less.
This is definitely a “reader's taste” type of book.
As I stated previously, this is HEAVY historical, so if you want to know a lot about Nebraska and the Midwest from early settlers through the Dustbowl, then I think you will enjoy this one. Russell very clearly had a ton of research behind this book. She also includes real black and white photos, which was a nice touch. I spent most of my life in Omaha, NE, so the setting of Nebraska was what drew me into this book in the first place.
Russell's writing is still great and one of my favorite's lyrically. There were so many lines that I would highlight because the prose just hit in the moment of reading.
Overall, there was a clear emphasis in this book, and I don't think I completely fit as a reader. I'll continue to read short-form from Russell and maybe try out backlist in case this was just this one that didn't fit my usual reading style. If anything I discussed above piqued your interest, please try this book out. I think Russell has a very distinct writing style that I do enjoy.