Title: The Antidote
Author: Karen Russell
Pages: 432
Release: March 11, 2025

Karen Russell uses the historic Black Sunday dust storm as the backdrop for her interwoven, intergenerational, and inter-temporal slice of American history – complete with a prairie witch who can unburden her patients from painful memories, a sentient scarecrow, murder, mayhem, dust, and basketball. Russell’s dust-choked world is perfectly rendered with beautiful prose and well-researched detail, the heavy dose of magical realism seamlessly woven into this historical-fiction tale and bringing unexpected life to a barren world.

She unpacks the “collapse of memory” in fascinating ways, offering the perspectives of the land and its collective inhabitants – each of them ill-informed, or at the very least, ill-at-ease, shaped by forces they cannot fully comprehend.

The Antidote has all the makings of a modern American classic, and I know it will stick with me for a good long while.

★★★★½

My thanks to my public library for providing me with a post-release copy in exchange nothing at all!