#2 – The Antidote by Karen Russell – 2025 Best Reads

I read Karen Russell’s The Antidote as I made my way across the Great Plains to attend the annual Willa Cather conference in Red Cloud, Nebraska, (a rollicking trip I documented for StreetLight magazine). The novel is set in that landscape just as it was becoming clear that there would be consequences for the homesteading movement, not least of which was environmental. The action is bracketed by the 1935 Black Sunday event, which made clear that the Dust Bowl was a disaster of biblical proportions, and the Republican River flood barely six weeks later.

The fictional town of Uz, Nebraska is located in just the right spot to be devastated by both. But it’s populated by magical characters, including a prairie witch who has the ability to receive people’s most difficult secrets and lock them away such that the teller can forget them until such time they want to take them up again. The other characters have their own fantastical abilities, like a teenage girl basketball star who becomes the witch’s apprentice, a WPA photographer whose photos are snapshots of the whose history of the place, and even a vivified scarecrow. (Uz does sound a lot like Oz, doesn’t it?)

The writing is excellent, even if the final scenes get a little didactic. And Russell knows how to show up the spiritual whirlwinds that linger in landscapes that America has viewed as our most placid.

Two thumbs up and a #2 ranking for The Antidote.

Previously in this series:

#3 – A Friend of Mr. Lincoln by Stephen Harrigan

#4 – Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

#5 – We Burn Daylight by Bret Anthony Johnston

#6 – Erasure by Percival Everett

#7 – Middlemarch by George Eliot

#8 – Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

#9 – By the Word Worked by Fleming Rutledge

#10 – Longitude by Dava Sobel