The Antidote by Karen Russell

Friday, Oct. 31, 2025--San Antonio

The Antidote by Karen Russell is a finalist for the National Book Award this year. It's a mixture of history and fantastical fiction.  The purpose seems to be to expose how much history of the USA has involved bad decisions based on greed, racism, religious persecution, fear of the unknown, etc., and the convenient loss of memory and cover ups that allow these problems to be easily overlooked and/or put behind them.  Set in southwestern Nebraska during the Dust Bowl, topics covered include the treatment of pregnant unmarried women, the story of how Native Americans were treated and their land stolen, how Blacks continued to be marginalized and not even categorized by the government as natural born American citizens, ways in which people try to rid their conscience of things they have done that they know to have been wrong, how natural resources are wasted by the population followed by their moving elsewhere to repeat the same mistakes over and over again rather than trying to maintain renewable practices, etc.  The characters in the story are interesting--a "Vault" which is a female witch who can go into a trance, hear a confession, and leave the person making the confession no longer being conscious of the worry/guilt they confessed; a teenage girl whose mother was an alcoholic and is now living with her uncle whose wife was murdered; a traveling photographer employed by the government to document life in America during the depression; a sheriff who is incompetent, corrupt, and evil; a scarecrow that seems to have some human qualities; a cat that wants revenge on the man who took her kittens to the river in a pillowcase and drowned them; etc.  The story is also about hope during times bad enough and hopeless enough that some are going elsewhere to start anew.  I'm not a big fan of fantastical (magical realism?) fiction, so I kept my rating for the book at 4 stars out of 5.