Book Review: The Antidote by Karen Russell
Book 35 of 2025
The Antidote is set in a fictional town but bookended by two historical events in 1935: the Black Sunday dust storm and the Republican River flood. Uz, Nebraska is slowly being crushed by the Great Depression and many residents are giving up. One spot of hope is the imminent execution of a tramp for a series of previously unsolved murders. Another is the presence of a prairie witch operating as a “vault”. Anyone can deposit their unwanted memories with her, receive a deposit slip, and obtain them again later if desired. The vault, who calls herself “The Antidote”, takes on the recollections but is ignorant of their content. On the day after the storm, the prairie witch wakes up with her vault emptied. She must now find a way to placate anyone who comes looking for a withdrawal, and retrain herself to take on new memories.
Helping her to do so is an 15 year old orphaned basketball player living with her uncle, a Polish immigrant, on a farm whose land was granted by the US government. Her sport is her only escape from the memories of her murdered mother until she meets the prairie witch and becomes her apprentice.
Her uncle, a lonely bachelor, wishes to connect more deeply with his niece but is unsure how to go about it. His wheat field is the only one to survive the dust storm, and he desperately wonders what he has done to deserve it and if his good fortune will last. The deposit slip he discovers hidden in his home reveals a tragedy he is determined to bring to light.
A photographer sponsored by Roosevelt’s New Deal makes a stop in Uz to document the bucolic life of its inhabitants. Instead, her pawn shop camera creates otherworldly images of what could be the past or the future, including of the Pawnee Indigenous Americans who previously lived on this land. Her photos also cast doubt on the identify of the supposed killer caught by the town sheriff.
Drawn together by circumstance, these four people are determined to show Uz’s residents its town’s true origins. This year’s Remembrance Day celebration should be one for the books. . . .
But at that point I was too perplexed by the chapters from the points of view of a scarecrow and a cat that I had lost my taste for the story. I appreciated the originality of The Antidote but it became a little too mystical for my liking. While it is mostly clear that the vault is meant to represent white Americans’ collective forgetting of stealing Indigenous Americans’ lands, there are climate change warnings and antiracist sentiments mixed in as well. The Antidote tried to do too much and in doing so watered down its meaning.
Highlights:
Yes, I complained about the cat but I was still a little tickled by it.
The budding romance between Dell, the basketball player, and her teammate Valeria is lovely.
Criticisms:
There were multiple chapters set in the Milford Industrial Home for unwed mothers (a real place in the early 20th century) that could have been from a different book altogether.
The most interesting plot (Dell’s) had the least satisfying ending.
Rating: 1.5 stars out of 5.
Won’t be purchasing that one!