The Antidote

Fantastical, historical, supernatural, and miraculously faithful to the legacy of a nation's ineradicable past, The Antidote is bookended by two real weather events that happened within months of each other in western Nebraska: the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935 and the flooding of the Republican River, which received twenty-four hours. Within the confines of this shadow history we meet a prairie witch who excels in the exile of memory and who calls herself the Antidote, having discovered her bleak magic at the age of fifteen when her baby was stolen from her at a home for unwed mothers; Harp Oletsky, a farmer whose land remains strangely unharmed while the town around him is obliterated by dust and drought; Dell Oletsky, his neice, a motherless daughter in furious flights from her grief, player-captain of a girls' basketball team abandoned by its sponsor, intent on making it to the playoffs while facing do2wn the storm of the century; a voluble scarecrow; and Cleo Allfrey, a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town's secrets and its fate. The Antidote is above all a reckoning with a nation's forgetting-enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthling not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. Karen Russell's imaginative reach is exuberantly unfettered, and her language soars; The Antidote is an extraordinary new novel from one of the most prodigiously gifted writers of our time.