After a deadly disease swept through their little kingdom, Xavi and Fee end up being the only children left behind. After ten years of isolation due to quarantine, and ten years of taking the antidote, the kingdom is on the cusp of reopening, and welcoming back its long lost children, when Prince Xavi and healer’s apprentice Fee find themselves embroiled in a decades old plot of vengeance and kingdom invasion.The Antidote is…not terribly good. It’s heavy prose wrapped around cliche fantasy story elements. There are some good points, or places where the story begins to flow. However the book then runs headfirst into eye rolling walls of WTF.
Fee is super special. Despite being a completely untrained witch, she keep getting more special and becoming more capable of amazing feats of amazingness up to the very last page. Despite vaguely defined magic rules and a world setting where witches are being hunted down and executed (and yet, witches also run everything, somehow) when Fee is exposed as a witch there is very little issue and no lasting repercussions. Most other characters are hand flailing victims waiting for Fee to save them.
And the biggest sin, in my opinion, is that almost all the plot and tension comes from Fee–and the readers—being purposefully misled and kept stupid about occurrences. Unfurling a plot through the investigations of the lead has its place and it often vital to engaging tales. But forcing tension by jumping through hoops to keep readers ignorant of what should be well known facts (like the kingdom’s recent history, or what mineral of great value is in the kingdom’s mines, or somehow that a professional level mining operations is still going on under everyone’s noses) is very agitating to me as a reader.
This book was a frustrating read for me, and while I’m sure some readers would love the setting and the prose, I just can’t recommend it as it has more problems than not.
Contains: no content warnings to note.