Karen Russell's The Antidote is unlike anything I have read in a long time. It mixes realism and the supernatural in telling the story of the Dust Bowl in a new way. Russell shifts perspective among several characters: a prairie witch, a wheat farmer, his orphan niece, a scarecrow, and a New Deal photographer with a time-traveling camera. That might sound like too balls in the air at the same time, but Russell pulls it off like the speculative fiction master juggler she is. The Antidote is an exploration of the dark secrets of a small town's past, multi-generational trauma, and a warning about the future (including the changing climate). I found this a completely absorbing read with a powerful message for our time. I won't be surprised if The Antidote wins the Pulitzer or National Book Award next year.

Hands down, my best read of 2025 so far. The Antidote is a cleverly crafted story of memory set in the dust bowl of Nebraska in the 30s. On the surface, it is a simple story of hard times, but unlike the dust blowing over the plains, there are deep roots to the characters, the land, and its problems. There is a passing along of hardship and cruelty that begs the reader to be courageous in the face of unfairness at the same time recognizing the cost it exacts. Superb.

I was hooked from the beginning!!
I devoured this book..
It was amazing, addictive, and engaging.
I was instantly sucked in by the atmosphere and writing style.
The characters were all very well developed .
The writing is exceptional and I was hooked after the first sentence.

2.75 stars rounded up. There are things about this book that are just beautiful. There is some magical writing and a few intriguing storylines. But the construction and pacing are where this book lost me. The narrative is told from five different perspectives, there was always the potential for a jumble. And unfortunately, this one fell prey. The constant switch from character to character felt overly jarring and disorienting, despite the chapter headings.

The plot is very slow to unfold and I got very impatient, nearly shelving this as a DNF. The character work was decent, but a few of them felt substantially more fleshed out than the others.

The literary prose will work well for some and I can understand the pull for literary awards based on the content. It just didn't work for me. I am a stickler about my endings, and this one didn't sit right. It felt half-hearted and didn't give me the closure I needed. There was too much of the story left to explore and after a slow paced, drawn out narrative I felt like I needed more reward for my efforts.

The Antidote is a thought-provoking collection of stories that blend the author’s use of magical realism, emotional insight, and stylistic writing.

At the beginning of the book, I struggled to tie the stories that are told through multiple characters into a cohesive message and almost set the book aside. I am glad that I did not. Each chapter tells a story from the perspective of a character where the lines between the bizarre and the ordinary blur in captivating ways.

Russell’s characters are wonderfully complex, and the overall premise of the book is one of the most imaginative stories I have ever read.

The book is set in a fictional town in Nevada during the dust bowl where a Prairie Witch resides and acts as a vault for people to store their memories- both good and bad. These memories are the connection that binds the book together as we learn about the lives of the other characters and how they are all connected to each other, their actions, and the land itself.

If you’re a reader who appreciates imaginative storytelling and beautifully crafted characters, The Antidote is a must-read. Make sure to give the story time to build. It is worth it; the story culminates with some important historical reflection and social commentary as well.

II was impressed with the imagination and depth of this story.

The Antidote is a quintessential American novel set in Nebraska during the infamous Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Asphodel Oletsky, niece of Harp Oletsky, is trying to find a way to keep her high school basketball team afloat after Black Sunday tears the team apart. She meets a prairie witch who makes money by listening to the townspeople’s confessions and keeping them locked away in her body like a vault until they come back to withdraw their memories. Harp doesn’t agree with this decision at first, but he has bigger things on his mind, like trying to figure out why his farm is the only green one around.. We even get to hear from the perspective of his scarecrow standing out in his field. Harp’s enigma is brought to even more attention when Cleo Allfrey, a New Deal photographer, is sent to Uz, Nebraska to capture the Dust Bowl on camera for the rest of the country to see.

This was an absolute joy to read. Russel does an incredible job making the reader feel connected to every single one of these characters and I couldn’t put it down. The storytelling in this novel is next level and it really satisfied my craving for an elevated adventure, while still being very character focused. This was so good, it made me reconsider my hesitations when picking up historical fiction. It’s opened my eyes to a genre I tend to ignore. I highly recommend if you’re looking for a literary, historical fiction novel mixed with a bit of magical realism. It was wonderful!

Thank you, Net Gallery, for the advanced copy of this book. This is a well-researched historical fiction set between two natural disasters during the dust bowl. There are multiple points of view. The story centers around a "prairie witch" who accepts the memories people want to store away. The memories are often tragic. We get a detailed history of just how devastating the settlers' effects were on the land and the people around them. I would definitely recommend.

Prairie witches aka Vaults who have memories whispered into their ears for safekeeping. A Nebraska dustbowl town, Uz, where a person is murdering women, leaving a calling card of a rabbit’s foot behind. A young indefatigable woman who plays basketball with all-out effort, perhaps to momentarily forget about her young murdered mother. A Black female photographer who is assigned a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity but discovers that her camera has a will, and perhaps purpose, all its own. And, a Polish-American farmer trying to raise his sister’s daughter and keep her safe despite herself while attempting to come to terms with a magic that has grown his wheat while every other farm in the area is devastated. Amidst a setting of dust storms and tornadoes, The Antidote by Karen Russell is an unflinching view of a hard life, where a mere drop of rain is celebratory and losing memories makes little better.

For a soft-hearted person like myself, many pages of The Antidote were hard to take. Indeed, the novel opens with a horrific scene of corralled jackrabbits being bludgeoned to death by men hoping to save their farms. And, if you accept the rabbit as a symbol of good luck, you could rightly claim that the farmers are sealing their fate. While it would be easy to pass this off as fiction, after all the novel is fiction, the jackrabbit round-ups were not, with around 2 million of the native species slaughtered. This is just one scene among many heart-breaking and hard-to-take scenes.

The funny thing is that normally I would have considered setting the book aside at this point with such an opening scene, but I felt compelled to continue and I’m glad I did because, although it is a frequently grim novel, it is also one of hope, where wisdom tries to shine through and goodness prevails. Mostly. But I think it is also a cautionary tale, one that Americans seem incapable of understanding if the current state of affairs is any indicator. Unlearned (ignored) history repeats itself.

Russell takes her time introducing us to the main characters, providing flashbacks, filling in back story, and showing us who they are currently. We feel for these characters, their predicament. We feel the hardness of life. We feel their tenuous control and then as that control slips away. We feel their humanity in juxtaposition to inhumane circumstances. And we feel the power of a vengeful tabby.

If I were in another frame of mind, I might be amused by how people are the same throughout time. When faced with facts that aren’t to their liking or that implicate them in some way, they rebel against the truth, become defensive, strike out at the individual who acknowledges the issue, refuse to accept responsibility.

Perhaps the most important theme of The Antidote is how necessary memories are. Not just an individual’s own memories, but the memories that exist through time. The collective memory that joins to make history. How that memory can be altered to create what never actually existed. And, how precious our memories are to us, how they make us who we are, forming the cells of our being.

The Antidote is an amazing and powerful novel, well-researched with a great deal of factual history and historical figures woven through the framework of a sad time in the US history. (It almost feels superfluous to say sad time in US history.)

I highly recommend The Antidote for open-minded readers who enjoy historical literary novels.

Many thanks to Knopf for sending me a copy.

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!