The Antidote
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Visit the Antidote of Uz – a prairie witch who can keep your memories safe. Speak into her emerald-green earhorn and your secrets will leave your mind and enter hers. Until the Black Sunday storm, which vaporizes every memory stored inside the Antidote. She wakes up empty – as bankrupt as America. If her customers ever discover the truth, her life will be in danger. The Antidote is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting. This gripping Dust Bowl epic echoes with urgent warnings for our own time, daring us to imagine what might have been – and what still could be.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Karen Russell has created another unique and impactful work of fiction; this time a historical tale with a moral that contemporary Americans are still not heeding. Characters reckon with the choices of ancestors that led to a genocide for Native American tribes and the climate crisis that became the American Dust Bowl. (Iowa City Public Library)
Interspersed with photographs, The Antidote tells the multi-faceted story of a Dust Bowl community from many different angles. It is a wonderfully strange and powerful book about memory and responsibility. (New Hampshire State Library)