The Antidote

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.