The Antidote

Starred review from January 1, 2025
In the wake of the destructive Black Sunday dust storm in 1935, four outcasts dare to offer their dying town a radical vision of the future. Antonina Rossi, an Italian immigrant and survivor of the Milford Home for Unwed Mothers, is the prairie witch of Uz, Nebraska. By falling into a trance, she relieves customers of memories they no longer want and deposits them in the vault of her subconscious. When the dust storm sweeps those memories clean away, Rossi recognizes her "bankruptcy" for what it really is: a mortal danger. Like most witches, Rossi is an outsider, and she throws her lot in with a band of fellow misfits. There's Asphodel Oletsky, a teen basketball star and born hustler in love with her best friend; Harp Oletsky, Dell's shy bachelor uncle, whose farm miraculously survives the roiling clouds of dust; and Cleo Allfrey, a Black government photographer sent to document the crisis with a camera that somehow captures the past--and the possibilities of the future. Russell has always expertly woven the strange into depictions of the everyday, and her long-awaited second novel is no exception. Though the language here is looser and more conversational than in her past work, she still has a knack for capturing images in a deft turn of phrase--the flowers of a potted begonia have "small, blushing faces," for instance. But what's really on display here is Russell's reckoning with America's past and her hopeful appeals for its future. She juxtaposes the immigration story of the Oletskys against the forced removal of Native Americans from the West and lets the catastrophe of the Dust Bowl resonate with the contemporary horrors of climate change. Characters struggle with their complicity in the American project of Native erasure and violence against vulnerable people, reinforced by the collective forgetting that prairie witches enable. While the full picture of the novel takes time to develop, the final portrait is as unforgettable as the images Cleo Allfrey hangs on her darkroom line: A singular, haunting vision that fearlessly excavates the past and challenges the reader to face the future head-on. A storytelling tour de force that lives up to the promise of its name.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from February 1, 2025
The prairie witch calls herself The Antidote because people feel so much better after she unburdens them of painful memories, storing them in her "vault." But when she finds herself in jail in the midst of a terrifying dust storm in Uz, Nebraska, she realizes that the deposits she's been paid to protect have vanished. High-school basketball star Asphodel Oletsky, living, since her mother was murdered, with her uncle Harp, a dryland farmer, is desperate to keep her winning team on the court after they lose their sponsor. Harp is haunted by how his Polish parents were forced off their land by the Germans, only to find themselves unwittingly doing the same to Native Americans. New Deal photographer Cleo Allfrey, at risk on the plains as a Black woman, arrives in Uz during the worst of the Dust Bowl and finds people pushed to the brink by drought, deadly and otherworldly dust storms, vanished crops and topsoil, unsolved murders, and a corrupt and brutal sheriff. Among many strange occurrences, Cleo's photographs inexplicably depict the horrific past and a possible future. Highly honored Russell follows two stellar story collections with her second novel, an ardent work of encompassing and compassionate historical fiction supercharged with her signature imaginative, astutely calibrated supernatural twists. A dramatic and uncanny tale of the drastic consequences of our destruction of nature and Indigenous communities.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from January 13, 2025
The spellbinding latest from Russell (Swamplandia!) infuses a Dust Bowl epic with gothic melodrama. It takes place in 1935 Uz, Neb., where farms have been ruined by a never-ending drought. Many of the residents visit Antonina Rossi, a “prairie witch” who keeps their darkest secrets as part of an occult tradition, advertising her services as an “Antidote to guilt” and other ailments. Among her clients are Harp Oletsky, whose parents emigrated from Poland in 1872 and stood by on their Nebraska homestead while the Pawnee people were driven off their land. After Antonina’s memory is wiped clean by the famous Black Sunday dust storm, she meets Harp’s niece Dell Oletsky, a 15-year-old basketball phenom whose mother, Lada, has been recently murdered. White hobo Clemson Louis Dew is wrongly convicted of Lada’s murder along with several others, and Antonina and Dell band together with Cleo Allfrey, a Black New Deal photographer, to prove Dew is being framed by the corrupt local sheriff. The author’s imagination is on full display as she conjures a legacy of prairie witches and depicts the magical qualities of Cleo’s camera, which captures the past and future. There’s even a sentient scarecrow who bears witness to the dust storms and violence. At the heart of the narrative is the Oletsky family’s reckoning with their complicity in the Pawnee people’s displacement. It’s an inspired and unforgettable fusion of the gritty and the fantastic. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary.