Jill's Reviews > The Antidote

“There is no way to tell the truth without first revealing ourselves as liars.”

The Antidote is simply extraordinary. Propulsive. Timely and urgent. I finished it on the eve of the most consequential election of my lifetime, and by the time I finished, I was shaking and crying and cheering because of its powerful warnings and hopeful vision for the times we live in now. It’s an incredible, must-read book.

It opens in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, during the Dust Bowl drought. Anyone who has read Karan Russell knows that her novels are bound to have an overlay of fantastical realism, and this one is no exception. The book is filled with the perils and promises that face us and how our memories are the key to understanding where we came from and where we’re going.

The Antidote follows five characters, the most compelling of whom is the Prairie Witch aka the Vault, whose body acts like a bank vault for neighbors to deposit their most heinous memories. The result is a town of spellbound amnesiacs who have holes inside them where their memories once resided. There’s also a Polish wheat farmer who is the sole person whose farm has not been destroyed by the dust storm (not unlike the main character Kate Southwood’s excellent Falling to Earth). His orphaned niece is a basketball star and an apprentice to the Prairie Witch. Finally, we meet a scarecrow infused with human thought and a New Deal photographer whose camera, purchased at a pawn shop, sees things that are not there yet and things hidden in the town’s shameful history.

Within these pages, we discover stories of a murdered woman and a monstrous sheriff, an onerous Home for Unwed Mothers that will move even the hardest hearts, the injustice dealt to the Sioux Indians and the cult behavior of a town that wants to sweep all this under the rug. At the same time, the magical camera reveals the myriad possibilities of what could happen if we trust our greater angels and trust the land and nature to teach us how to see it.

Ultimately, this hopeful book focuses mainly on memory – memory lost, memory revealed, and new memories waiting to be created. The novel is an achingly profound and transformative book. I owe a deep debt to Knopf and NetGalley for enabling me to be an early reader of a novel that will surely take its place as one of my top books of 2025.