This is Kelsey Patterson with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out. Today, I’m recommending The Antidote, the long-awaited new novel from Pulitzer-prize finalist Karen Russell.
Already a national bestseller, this work has been named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from a variety of publications including Lit Hub, TIME, Esquire, People, and The Chicago Review of Books. And you can find it as one of the twelve featured titles on this year’s Adult Summer Reading list at the Sioux City Public Library.
The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz was already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. This story follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a sort of bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice caught in furious flight from her grief; a sentient scarecrow, and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.
According to author interviews, Russell has shared this novel is about the collapse of memory. In it, she examines how people and societies share memories and pass down their histories—often willfully omitting certain things or passing on incomplete or inaccurate versions of those stories and the danger that poses to our collective history.
For a story about a town dealing with a terrible past that’s been swept under the rug, Russell ironically (and masterfully I must say) uses elements of fantasy to help her tell it.
Check out The Antidote and the other featured titles on the 2025 Adult Summer Reading list at the Sioux City Public Library.
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