“A person can lose everything in an instant. A fortune, a family, the sun. I’ve had to learn this lesson twice in my life.”
“The coroner gave me the only picture that I have of Mama, a print of her body in the ditch.”
“I guess, the way I see it, you could tell the story of the Dust Bowl another way. You could widen the lens and say: this land is blowing because we stole it from the people who knew how to care for it.”
Karen Russell’s The Antidote ( Knopf 2025) went a bit higher on my TBR due to Booker Prize predictions. Having read it, I can say without pause or question that this quirky, magical, gritty, historical novel needs to be on that list – it may very well by my top read of the year, and I was remiss to not include it. There’s something Maguire’s Wicked meets Louise Erdrich meets Stephen King about it, which explains why I love every single word on every single page, but it’s also wholly its own beast. And what a beautiful beast it is.
With themes of stolen lands, lives, and stories, Russell plops us in Uz County, Nebraska, nestling her story between the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935 and the flooding of the Republican River, and the story that takes place between the dust and the rain is absolute perfection.
The Antidote is a Prairie Witch, a Vault. People can deposit their memories inside her to retrieve or not retrieve later. Only after Black Sunday, she’s found herself bankrupt – the memories are gone. Before she became the Antidote, she was Antonina Rossi, and her sections are told to her son, addressed as “You.”
Asphodel “Dell” Oletsky is the young girl sent to live with her bachelor uncle after her drunk mother winds up dead in a ditch. She’s driven to win and plays basketball on a team that’s heading to the championship but just lost their sponsor. She becomes the Antidote’s assistant to help fund the team.
Harp Oletsky is Dell’s bachelor uncle. A religious man, he tries to understand why God didn’t let a speck of dirt into his home during Black Sunday and why his wheat flourishes while all around him, the crops have withered and died. Something is happening at his homestead – he understands that much. He just doesn’t know what.
Cleo Allfrey is the New Deal photographer who finds herself in possession of a bit of a magical camera.
Other POVs that enter the novel are the Scarecrow, who stands tall during the dust storms and who is gathering memories of what or who he was before, and Cat, the sheriff’s orange tabby who has her own vendetta and motives.
The Antidote is strange and fierce, gritty and gracious, honest and hopeful.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 