The Antidote

A Novel

De: Karen Russell

Narrado por: Elena Rey, Sophie Amoss, Mark Bramhall, Shayna Small, Jon Orsini, Natasha Soudek, Karen Russell, James Riding In

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD • WINNER OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST BOOK AWARD • THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE

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 dustbowl

enjoyed learning exploring the legendary Dustbowl in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma as well as the Indigenous people involved, effected and affected. I knew about the Industrial school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This novel explored the Pawnee experience

Excellent exposition of characters. The landscape included and the sensitive retelling of a painful period in American history.

Sensitive weaving of fact and fiction. The magical and the brutal reality of the connections to today’s environmental threats.

Karen Russell writes books like Nobody’s business. Period.

I don’t need Any convincing, I’m running Directly to Amazon to buy All of Karen Russell’s books on my Kindle!

Disappointing

I was hoping for more from this book, especially given all the attention it has received. Toward the beginning, the poweful descriptions of the environmental disaster that was the Dust Bowl gestured toward our current state of affairs only obliquely, however inescapably, and the mythical elements she introduced were fresh and had potential. That potential wasn't fully developed or explored as the book went on, though, and by the end the Star-Trek-style moral 2 x 4's (plural - so many reasons to be horrified by our past) were just tedious. She's not wrong, but we've heard it all before and her attempt to switch things up with an injection of hope was weak and unconvincing. Even weaker was how she resolved the conflict with the main bad guy. I liked the big reveal at the end, but it needed more space.

I like Karen Russell, but everything about this novel suggests her talents lay in short stories.

The narrators were fantastic with the fatal exception of the teenager - I was sorely tempted to skip her chapters she was so annoying. Probably realistic for a teenager, but who wants to listen to a 16-year-old's breathless melodrama for hours on end?

Enjoyed All But the End

I listen to a wide variety of books. This story had excellent readers and an unexpected supernatural underpinning that was intriguing. I also enjoyed the well developed characters and all of their backstories.

Sadly, the end of the book seemed like a disjointed addendum.. Instead of missing the lifelike characters as I usually do after finishing a good book, I was instead just glad to be done with its Bolshevik sermon.