The Antidote by Karen Russell - option 1 [ONLINE]

The Antidote by Karen Russell is our September novel. Sign up for 9/20 or 9/27. Publisher's description:

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.

"The Antidote blends speculative and fantasy elements with rich language and vivid characters in an effort not to escape reality but to comment even more thoughtfully on it. . . . Russell’s lyrical writing dazzles on every page." —The New York Times

"Spellbinding. . . . Russell's instrument — her language — is uncanny.” —NPR

“For a while, it’s difficult to divine the organization of “The Antidote,” which picks up narrators and storylines like a tornado sucks up tires and cows. But give it some room, and the novel’s awesome movement becomes captivating. . . Russell may be writing about a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, but the scale here is large. Into this book she’s packed a whiff of Steinbeck’s grandeur, a murder mystery, the legacy of genocide, a young woman’s coming of age, a Dickensian story of a missing baby, a warning about climate change and even a talking cat.” —The Washington Post

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