"A blank canvas. My children deserve that. I will not pass these stories down to them. Scrape the blood away from my memory, so that they may paint with sky."

This story is many pieces of a puzzle. It's a lyrical story about people - and our will to survive. It's about having regrets and terrible moments and then deciding to "have amnesia" about it - by depositing that memory away in a prairie witch and then moving on with your life, carefree. It's about the collective amnesia of taking land that wasn't ours, the atrocities and murders that we did to do it. It's about the children that were ripped from native families, lost centuries of stories, history, and love. It's about climate change - and that we still aren't learning from what we did in the past in order to inform our future.

It's also a beautiful story about a small group in a small town that band together, fight together, to try to do something new. I loved the scarecrow, the photographer, the prairie witch, the farmer, the cat and the basketball player. They all had their piece of it all to play and I loved how they banded together. Sometimes all it takes is saying "I believe you." It was a little rough to start - there are some brutal first parts of the story (beware - animals are harmed!) but the rest of the story was engaging and interesting and the mystery of it all kept me going. I loved the photos layered throughout the story and how they helped bring this period of time alive.

A huge thank you to the author and publisher for providing an e-ARC via Netgalley. This does not affect my opinion regarding the book.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an advance copy in exchange for honest feedback. Loved the way the plot built on itself throughout the book. An interesting look at what it means to have a collective memory and the choices we make to maintain it.

The Antidote weaves together the perspectives of five different characters in a struggling fictional Nebraska town during the Dust Bowl. An engaging work of historical fiction with just a touch of magic, it kept interested throughout even as I struggled to connect deeply with the characters. A worthwhile look into a particular point in American history.

Thank you Karen Russell, Knopf, and NetGalley for providing this ARC for review consideration. All opinions expressed are my own.

This is the second ever ARC that I DNF'd. The way the premise is presented when reading about the book and how the book is actually written and structured are wildly different. It's touted as magical realism historical fiction set during the Dust Bowl right when Black Sunday rolls around.

In reality, it's an extremely heavy-handed allegorical jumble. There's a "prairie witch" who can intake memories from people (like a deposit) and then can return the memory to them later. She awakens on Black Sunday to find that her "deposits" in her "bank" are gone. Yes, just like the physical banks. Why anyone would need to actually temporarily store memories is not explained and doesn't make any logical sense to me.

The town is called Uz. (Like Oz, get it?). There's a bunch of POVs, yet they all sound the same in how they're written. Everything feels like convoluted winks at the camera. Very disappointed with this one.

The Antidote is my first Karen Russel book, but not my last. I was immediately grabbed by the stunning writing and the novel magic system, such as it is. I think that this book had incredible potential.

Ultimately, I think it loses its way. The character growth felt too extreme: the Harp of the beginning of the book is nothing like the Harp of the end. This could work, but I’m not convinced it was entirely earned. I adored the message about how important it is to remember our history and the implications for today’s political climate, but found it hard to believe how easily our main characters thought they could change things. And while not the point, I found it frustrating that we spent so long on the killings without ever receiving a conclusion.

This is a major novel, I loved every second of reading it. I can't believe I haven't read any Russell before. Her prose was so fun diving into. I'm very impressed by how well she balances the rather serious parts of the plot with some fun magical realism. This balance could've easily been broken into a mess by a less skilled writer. I need to read everything she's written. Hugely recommend, this novel should win awards for 2025.

This book took me forever to read and I nearly gave up several times. I really liked that it was based around the dust bowl and I loved the idea of the prairie witch and the way this ties into society and the past. The book is told in different pov, yet there was nothing that really set these voices apart. i felt that they were too similar in dialogue and did not really differentiate on tone either. I felt that the author showed a lot of creativity in the way they wrote and how they blended genres, but I felt it was too slow paced.

Incredibly writing, memorable characters, scathing social commentary, a hint of the weird and sometimes horrifying, The Antidote is an unforgettable historical novel set in the Great Plains of the US in the era of the Dust Bowl and The Great Depression with flashbacks taking the reader into the late 1800s. This is a slow burn, gradually unfolding, unflinching look at this particular time and place. It takes its time and alternates perspective in a way that I found to be fascinating and entertaining.

Highly recommend for those who don’t mind multiple points of view, starts and stops with the plot as the author builds a powerful story through flashbacks, and ultimately a gut punch of truth and a critical lens of atrocities that are typically glossed over in our modern view of history. Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced digital copy!

The Antidote is a masterpiece of a novel. In the shortest of summations, I’d call it historical fiction about Nebraska in the 1930s. The book opens and closes with two mega storms that occurred in real life: Black Sunday and the Republican River Flood. We experience these events through five main players: Asphodel Oletsky (a teenage basketball player cum hooligan), her uncle, the local Prairie Witch, Cleo Allfrey (a New Deal photographer), and the local sheriff. Between the storms, there is self realization for all these characters. One copes with the loss of a mother, one continues grieving a child, one comes to understand their role in the mostly successful ethnocide of the Pawnee people of Nebraska. Throughout all these grounded and human experiences, Russell weaves magical elements in her words and scenery. Often, while reading scenes of Asphodel spending time with the Prairie Witch, I would picture the work of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Her choices when describing things are literally delicious: “freedom turned out to be a territory we occupied.” “If this is hell, and I am tinder for eternal fire, why should I feel such joy?” Aside from her word paintings, there are actual photographs in the novel, taken from the Library of Congress archives. It brought me so much joy to see these images, depressing as some are, because visiting their digital archives is one of my favorite things to do. In the novel, the photographs are by Cleo Allfrey, a Black Woman traveling the country alone. She is constantly undermined by her boss and is a mostly stoic character, which makes supplying her with a magical camera feel more real, like some of the best Twilight Zone episodes.

The expanding and collapsing of time and space within a novel is no small feat and Russell pulls it off. It reminds me of another deeply affecting recent historical fiction, The Night Watchman. They both take place in native lands, both imagined and real. The displacement happens not only in America, but in Poland, and the people are not the only ones to suffer from the brutalities of colonialism. Most Americans are only beginning to truly understand the atrocities this so-called nation has been committing here, since its inception. It has also been a willing assistant for atrocities overseas and we see the pattern continuing ad nauseum. If fiction is a place to grapple with these events, The Antidote belongs on any to be read list. Like The Night Watchman before it, it should probably also receive The Pulitzer Prize. When I finished the book my friend walked in on me crying. When you feel it that deeply, and there are so many feelings to choose from… that’s good fiction.

Karen Russell does not disappoint with this wildly imaginative and deeply moving tale of grief, dispossession, and ultimately, reconciliation. Russell is a brilliant and poignant writer, able to paint so vividly with her language that it is almost like a visual medium. The characters in this book are all untied by loss and an ability to see truth, whether supernatural or mundane. They are all afraid. And yet, they are all compelled to act despite their fears. It is that agency that makes the characters populating this novel so dynamic and captivating. The ending sequence at Founders Day is the weakest part of the piece simply because it verges on preachiness without any actionable solutions. Very little is resolved, except for the cat’s story, which feels especially unsatisfying after such a hearty journey, But the journey is well worth it, nonetheless.

Fans of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead will want to grab this gorgeous magical-realist novel set on the Nebraska prairie during the height of the Dust Bowl climate disaster. Russell, a MacArthur grant winner, is best known for her collections of short stories, and this is only her second novel after the 2012 Pulitzer finalist Swamplandia! It is well worth the wait, offering a ferociously moving meditation on America’s refusal to come to terms with the violence and injustice of its own past. The story begins on “Black Sunday,” April 14, 1935, when tornadic dust storms destroyed farmland throughout the Great Plains, and a variety of point-of-view characters lead the reader to an intimate understanding of the Great Midwestern Drought that decimated the farmlands of the American prairie and worsened the Great Depression.

The premise sounds grim, but Russell draws on some of our most enchanting national myths to bring these characters to life. The alert reader will quickly realize that yes, this novel is set in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, in the depths of the Dust Bowl Depression, and yes, the inhabitants are menaced by dust tornados, and yes, the main characters are a scrappy orphan girl, a mysterious scarecrow, a stiff midwestern bachelor searching for love, and an exhausted prairie witch whose task it is to collect the toxic memories of her neighbors and store them away inside herself. But Russell’s evocations of L. Frank Baum’s American fairytale are subtle and never distract from the gritty, tender, fierce realism of this expansive story. The supernatural elements of the novel are infused with such a deep, compassionate humanity that the reader never has the sense that this is anything but a completely true story. Russell has created a masterpiece that will probably be on many 2025 award lists.

The main thing I learned from this book is that I just do not appreciate the author's writing as so many do. I found it flat and boring as well as overwritten

Well this was absolutely tedious. The flat writing, the attempt to push WAY too much into this story, and the hollow moralizing and hand-wringing all work together to make this one of the most tiresome books I've ever read. It's so bad that despite knowing I'd liked Russell's previous work while I was reading I'd have to keep wondering why.

Let's jump to the big offense first: the hand-wringing. The constant feeling bad. The reams of pages and pages wasted on white guilt. The truly insane trajectory of these scenes where either a) the white character is confronted by their racism and openly repents of it or b) the white character bears witness to systemic racism and comprehends their part in it. I...what? Has anyone seen this? Ever? In real life? I'm not saying people don't grow or change: I'm saying that the space of a conversation isn't enough to convince someone a culturally beloved movie is overrated, never mind get someone to apologize for a racist comment or perception they made at the top of the talk. But that's how fast the about-face seems to happen here. And if the character isn't in a conversation they're full on understanding their place in the historical moment which is even more laughably unreal. Again: not saying a person can't come to this understanding. But if you're doing farmwork, what? 18 hours a day? And also your wife has had three miscarriages and you're crazy depressed and homesick, do you really have the bandwidth for full conscious knowledge of your part in an ongoing genocide? These cohesive, thesis-like sections where these characters lay out the wrongs done to the Native people felt, well, like theses. Accurate, to be sure. Important, to be sure. But written very much like something that belonged in an article, not a novel. Characters cannot exist as mouthpieces for admitting the wrongs of the past, because then they cease to be characters. And if they are no longer characters then this is less a novel and more a Very Special Episode: Dust Bowl edition.

It definitely doesn't help that there is literally no Native character with anything resembling a personality. The most compelling aspects of Zintkala Nuni's part of the story are factual and nothing to do with Russell's invention; Dell's Native teammate gets to talk about being Native and that's it; and then there's the girl Harp's mother tries to save who has, I think, three lines of dialogue. This would be absolutely galling, if most of the white characters weren't also written with such thin, incomplete strokes. The villainous sheriff, for example, is never more than the Villainous Sheriff. There's no depth to him or to most of the other characters. They feel as incomplete as the plot, which brings me to the second major issue: there's too much going on here. Murder investigations! Basketball tournaments! Young love! Old love! And guess what? None of that gets a proper follow-through.

The murders I could let go of (because one of the few consistent throughlines was Dell trying to accept the lack of closure to her mother's death)...had we not spent so long on the cover-up of that one killing. Again, the hand-wringing here was legion: the Antidote fretting and agonizing over her responsibility to this woman and then after showing photographs of her being moved just like...completely forgetting about her. (Just like the novel's ending completely forgets to offer a real solution for being complicit in the taking of Native lands!) But forgetting, after all, is the theme here, right? Forgetting to show the moment when Dell and Valeria became a couple (one chapter Dell is hard-core longing, and the next, somehow, they're already kissing? without talking about it? like they do it all the time, the hell); forgetting to have literally anyone from Uz show up at the basketball game (I though the team was supposed to be a beacon of hope for the town? how can that be if no one even cares to come watch?); forgetting to explain why, exactly, the sheriff made the Antidote listen while he drowned kittens. (With how often it was brought up I thought there was going to be a flashback to her asking for one of the cat's kittens and him killing them all to spite her or something, but no. No real reason except that a Villainous Sheriff's got to Villain.) How exhausting to be kept waiting for all of that to be brought out and brought together only for absolutely none of it to be.

But speaking of waiting, I'll give some credit where it's due: the resolution of the Antidote finally finding her son was lovely. One of the few places where the fantastical elements of the story really worked. Also one of the spots of genuinely elevated writing, which was a nice reprieve because, hoo boy, elsewhere it was dull af.

It's never bad. It's never unreadable. But it's clunky, and lacking in verve. The dialogue feels especially tepid and unnatural. I don't get how a writer of Russell's level hasn't noticed that when English speakers talk - unless they're fresh to the language - we use contractions whenever we can. Drop them for emphasis, sure, but otherwise what the hell are you doing pronouncing "it is"?? It's such a small thing, I know, but it's such a small thing to correct too. And an oversight like this makes me feel crazy for having expected better on the other, more complicated aspects of this book.

I guess that's the bottom line, though: I expected better. I expected characters to have messy reactions to the atrocities around them; process them; and come out on the other side in a way that felt like they were bringing me with them. I expected that being told a girls' basketball team mattered in the chaos of all that dust would lead to them actually mattering. I expected a character who stored people's memories to understand from the jump that, no shit, her line of work involves shady cover-ups. I expected a decent book, not this wearisome slog.

But hey. At least I got to see a picture of a Dust Bowl-era cat.

Beautiful premise and gorgeous writing as always but this one really went off the rails two-thirds of the way through and didn't cohere. I was disappointed in the end, even more so given how much I love her other work.

Although THE ANTIDOTE is set in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, it reflects the horrible Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression of the 1930's. Uz has a Black Sunday when there was a sort of dust blizzard. Most everything in the town was covered; buildings, farms, vehicles and people. Many people died and others suffer lung illnesses afterwards.
This novel is told by a wide variety of characters. The title character believes herself to be a prairie witch. She calls herself the Antidote because she takes away people's deepest secrets that continue to plague them. They speak into an ear horn and she files them into a Vault in case they want them again some day. Of course, most people never do that.

Harp Oletsky is another pivotal character. Only his farm survives Black Sunday in all of Nebraska. He ends up taking in his niece Delle. She is a fantastic basketball player and continues to lead her team after the Coach leaves for a safer place. Eventually, Delle believes she has the same gift as the prairie witch and wants to be her apprentice.

There are other characters that seem to have special talents. The author uses a fair amount of fantasy and magic realism to flesh most of this saga.

Several of the characters have similarities in their past where they have been torn away from their native land. The part that resonated most with me was how all of people now live on land stolen from Indigenous tribes. The author writes about horrific events that occurred along the plot of this novel and also in the Author's Notes. Although we can't change the past, we can make things more equitable.

The issue of climate is woven into this fantastic story. The poor planting decisions in the Midwest contributed to a lot of the Dust Bowl era. As modern issues are ignored, the whole earth has horrific storms and heat waves.

This is the first novel that author Karen Russell has written since SWAMPLANDIA. It's not an easy read, but it's a very important one.

Thanks to Knopf Publishers, the author and NetGalley for giving me opportunity to read and review this book

Like everything I have read by Karen Russell, The Antidote is a difficult book to review. The story intertwines five characters, with three-ish narrators (there are a few more, but there are three main narrators) set in a Nebraska town where people are leaving at an alarming rate due to the failure of their crops and farms. With the real life devastation of loss and failure as the backdrop, Russell writes a story filled with superstition, magical realism, and hope. One of the main characters, known as the Antidote, is a “Prairie Witch” or “Vault”, a person who for a small fee will hold onto your worst memories and secrets so that you can live a happy life. She encounters a young girl, Dell, who has lost her mother and is living with her uncle Harp, who's farm is the only one where crops seem to be thriving under the watchful eye of a sentient scarecrow. Added to this is a serial killer, The Lucky Rabbit Foot Killer going through Nebraska killing women, crooked cops, and a black photographer, Cleo, who has been sent to Nebraska to be a photographer for FDR, but whose camera is taking photographs of the horrible history of the region. The Antidote is a deeply unsettling yet wonderfully beautiful novel that is not easily forgotten.

This is not a quick read. This is not a novel that you can just zip through and go onto the next thing. Karen Russell writes books that demand your attention, that need to be absorbed. Stories that will sink into you and make you think about them for hours when you are not reading. The density of her writing is one of those aspects that can be appreciated because the story is supposed to be heavy, the situation the characters find themselves in is difficult, and the deep sadness of loss and everything that you own being destroyed is something that can be felt in the pages of The Antidote, like the hurt that the characters experience is real. And some of the story is real. The story of The Antidote is told against the backdrop of a drought in Nebraska, with dust storms killing crops and everyone starving to death. The buffaloes have been slaughtered, and the Native Americans have been pushed off the land. The violence and blood have soaked into the land, and this story is the result of this history. The real history and the magic that Russell adds makes a story that is immersive and heartbreaking.

Karen Russell’s writing is hard to review because it is nearly perfect. This is one of the few novels I have read in a long time where I just want to write “No notes.” Russell has written another novel where there is not much that can be said about it besides praise. Though it is not an easy read, it is an important read because Russell is writing the new American classics. 

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I received this book in exchange for an honest review from NetGalley. Wow, this is such an ambitious story that I'm having trouble reviewing it. The Antidote is a mashup of historical fiction with some magical realism elements, but it's so much more than that. Only an author of Russell's caliber could pull off such a feat. Definitel had moments of being in awe of her brain to craft such a story. When I began this Dust Bowl- era novel about a witch, I had no idea where it would go - and I want to let anyone who reads this take the same journey, so I can't get into plot much. I think I land around 4-4.5 stars with this book overall - there were parts that were a little dry and slow for me. While 432 isn't terribly long, I think it could have been a little shorter.

“But everyone misremembers vividly… A memory is never the fullness of what happened.”
This is one of those rare books that went right back onto my TBR list the moment I finished it. The Antidote is a magnificent novel that masterfully blends magical realism, historical fiction, and sharp reflections on greed, silence, and humanity.
It asks: does the heinousness of an act disappear if it’s never spoken of—if history simply refuses to remember? This book doesn’t just tell a story; it invites you to slow down, to re-read passages, to let the weight of its words settle and stir something in you.
There are so many layers I’d love to unpack in a formal setting—The Prairie Witch, the Scarecrow, Cleo! Much like the Antidote herself, this novel may prove divisive. It’s heavy, unapologetically bold, and leans socially progressive in ways that may challenge some readers. But for me, that’s what makes it courageous.
A fiercely original and hauntingly told story. I can’t recommend it enough.

After 43 days, I am calling it. I can’t push myself any further. I tried the digital arc that I received, then I added the audio, then I added a print copy, in hopes that I would be able to push thru. I love this period of US History, but the slow meandering plot just did me in. Also, at this part of the book, some things were added to the story that I felt just slowed it down further and didn’t make sense with where things were going. I read the last few chapters and, honestly, I wish I’d have stopped trying weeks ago. Many people love this one, so don’t take only my word for it. It just sadly wasn’t the book for me.

Thanks to Knopf for allowing me to read this one. I love Dust Bowl stuff and it stinks that this one didn’t work out for me.

I loved this book. Unique, interesting, and varied characters, a very bleak setting, a lot of grief and loss, a little bit of mystery. A perfect blend of magical realism, which I know is not for everyone, but I really enjoyed those elements. I was rooting for all of these characters throughout the entire story, and would have gladly read another 100+ pages. Ultimately a story of hope, community, love, and resilience.