May 13

May 13 The Antidote

About the book

Author: Karen Russell
Publisher: Knopf

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.

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Bookshop.org (print or ebook) | Libro.fm (audio)

My Review

Karen Russell writes exactly my flavor of weird literary magical realism, so it’s no surprise that I loved The Antidote. But it’s not the presence of those elements that does it here — it’s the way she weaves them together. And nobody does it like Karen Russell.

The Antidote is a polyphonic novel set in the height of the 1930s Dust Bowl in a fictional town called Uz, Nebraska. Playing (lightly) on the Oz theme, some of those POVs include a “prairie witch” who can receive and restore memories like deposits in a bank vault (a main character) and a scarecrow (who has only a handful of short chapters). There’s also a teenage girl who loves basketball and recently lost her mother, her older bachelor uncle, and a Black woman photographer whose camera is more than it seems.

What Russell weaves for us this time is a tapestry of hope for a future that can only happen if we all reckon with our shared culpability in historical colonialism and violence. I don’t want to give too much more than that away, but this book is an important one, especially in today’s political climate. I’m still noodling on all the layers inherent to the book’s title.

This also worked great on audio — the full cast brought these characters to life brilliantly.

I can’t believe more people aren’t buzzing about this book, but I’ll definitely be rooting for it when prize season comes around this fall.