The Antidote Summary

The Antidote Overview

Karen Russell’s The Antidote is a historical novel with elements of magical realism, told through shifting first-person narrators in a Dust Bowl town on the Great Plains. In Uz, Nebraska, a prairie witch known as the Antidote stores other people’s memories just as a catastrophic dust storm and a string of local murders push the community toward panic, scapegoating, and flight. Following the Antidote, the dryland farmer Harp Oletsky, his teenaged niece Asphodel (Dell), and the outsiders drawn to their unusual field, the book traces how secrets are bought, sold, forgotten, and recovered. Themes include memory, grief, justice, corruption and power, family, and environmental catastrophe.