You Should Read IDLE GROUNDS by Krystelle Bamford
Reading Notes
It’s been a while since I was a kid, but as I recall, there are two types of childhood games.
The first are games in the playful sense of the word: imaginative storylines enacted for fun, or complex rules created for diversion. One of my favorites, for instance, involved strapping on my rollerblades and pretending to be a figure skater. I’d race my friends to the middle of our cul-de-sac, hoping to earn first dibs. The winner always chose Kristi Yamaguchi; second place, Nancy Kerrigan; and last place, Tonya Harding.
Despite the applause we heard in our heads, despite the circle stops we insisted were double axels, despite the gravel crunching through our wheels that we swore was fresh ice—we all knew our activity for what it was: a game. I never believed I was a famous figure skater.
But the second type of childhood game is only a game long after it has ended, when your adult perspective reframes the entire experience. While it is happening, it is intensely, magically—even unsettlingly—real, like the summer I spent hunting for ghosts, convinced that the shimmering air above the asphalt contained spirits trying to communicate with me. My friend and I recorded our observations in a notebook. We named the presences, assuming the shivery air near the garage must be a different entity than the melting air near the roundabout. I also checked out every book I could find about ESP and telepathy in the kids’ section of the library. I doubt my parents have any memory of this, so seriously did I believe in paranormal possibilities, so secretly did I pursue them for a season.
Me, circa my ghost-hunting days
This second type of game—a game that isn’t a game at all—can be found in Krystelle Bamford’s Idle Grounds.
In the 1980s, a group of young cousins spends the afternoon together on and around their aunt’s property. Their families have assembled at Frankie’s house to celebrate someone’s birthday. As the cars arrive, “[c]ousins stuck their legs out from the car doors, always the children first, parents girding their loins behind the steering wheels. . . . Cousins eyed up cousins, standing a full cousin-length away, giving a shy wave while the adults eased themselves out with a dish covered in tinfoil or a six-pack of Beck’s tinkling like a piggy bank” (6).
The number of cousins is indeterminate: “There were ten of us cousins give or take and the tallest and also the oldest one was Travis. He was twelve” (8). Most of the novel is told from a plural-first POV of the cousins, a “we” that conjures the specific collective power of children.
As the party opens, the cousins crowd into a bathroom at Travis’ behest, where he points out the window. Just when the kids are about give up, they see something inexplicable:
“At first it was just a movement, like when you close your eyes in the sun and things jump about. From the wall of trees hiding the childhood home to Frankie’s shed. A ten-yard dash. . . . Oh, it was fast, you had to give it that. So fast you just knew that whatever it was didn’t want to be seen, but the thing is, we had seen it.”
Before they can determine what they’ve seen, young Abi, Travis’ sister, wanders off, and the cousins must not only find her but also deal with the strange thing they witnessed going “[z]ip zip zip” near the edge of Frankie’s property (10):
“‘What should we do?’ one of us asked. And because it was framed as a question which implied the possibility of many kinds of answers, no one said ‘Let’s get a grown-up’ for fear maybe of being too obvious.”
Bamford’s narrative voice underscores the loyalty, logical or not, kids hold amongst themselves. It’s a wordless understanding that something big is going on, and the bigness of the thing negates a grown-up’s ability to understand it. The very worst outcome in such a situation would be for an adult to dismiss your concerns as make-believe.
In Idle Grounds, the adults take no heed when the cousins announce Abi’s disappearance. The aunts and uncles insist that Abi was just with them a moment ago, so Travis leads the search for her. As the cousins wander out to their parents’ cars, they notice a change in the atmosphere: “The tree line glistened fatly, more than it had any right, and we knew. It was telling us. It was letting us know” (65).
This scene sucked me into the cousins’ hot June afternoon because I knew, too. A heat mirage may be a ghost or a portal to a parallel universe, but it is nothing an adult can comprehend.
Now and then, over the course of the afternoon, the narrator breaks into a singular-first voice. These moments tend to occur when the narrator looks back from an older perspective, or when they do not agree with the collective cousins’ memory. You can see this switch when the cousins find a trail of Oh Henry! bars spilled on the road:
“We sat down, drew up our knees, and ate. Only Owen wasn’t partaking so we peeled a candy bar for him and fed him in elegant bites . . . It was, looking back on it, a lovely meal but not the saccharine orgy we had originally envisioned. It was something to do with the car not appearing when it should have, I believe, and I believe that it was probably our first adult meal, consuming something delicious against a backdrop of foreboding.”
Interspersed with the narration of the children’s hunt for their missing cousin are “Intermezzo” chapters that provide information about the adults in the family, including a mediocre novel by their grandmother. Between these interludes and the snippets of conversations the cousins overhear, readers slowly piece together the history of this complex, sometimes troubled family.
A family like any other, that is.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m a sucker for novels about dysfunctional families, but that is not why I loved Idle Grounds. The cousins’ story reminds me of a line from Mary Karr’s memoir The Liars’ Club: “[W]hen you’re a kid and something big is going on, you might as well be furniture for all anybody says to you.”
Bamford’s achievement, in my estimation, is telling a story of childhood tragedy that always takes the children seriously.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2025
Length: 189 pages; audiobook runs 5 hours
Timeline: a single summer afternoon in the 1980s, with some flashbacks
Narrator: first-person narrator, primarily in the plural voice of the cousins
Pairs Well With: The Mysteries by Marisa Silver; treehouses; a vintage 1980s digital watch; Steven Spielberg’s Hook
Book Club
When Travis and the cousins set out to find Abi, they must also face their fears of the unexplained movement they spotted from the window: “We were scared because it’s a bad feeling to look for one thing when it’s equally likely you’ll find the very thing you’ve been avoiding—in our case the zipping thing and whatever friends it might have—when your odds are fifty-fifty” (83). What the adults brush off as imaginary is extremely real for the children. What childhood fear or experience of yours felt immediate and true at the time, but could later be explained rationally? How did understanding that explanation change your perception of the experience?
The adults in the novel practice a version of free-range parenting that, for better or worse, would probably get CPS called on them nowadays. Over the course of the afternoon, the cousins enter a stranger’s house, eat candy bars spilled on the road, play tennis on an abandoned court, and visit a cemetery. What role do you think the adults played in the novel’s outcome? How do you think the cousins’ freedom impacted them, both that day and in the future?
Close Reading
Travis, the oldest cousin, passes through the “mantle” of shimmering air first. Although the other cousins are afraid, they eventually follow him:
“Autumn was the first one through and we all filed in behind her. You could see it up close, like wet rubber cement, separating the woods from the house, but unlike rubber cement it had no smell and as we passed through it we felt nothing, not even a shiver, but we still knew, every last one of us, that we had emerged into an entirely different place with probably different rules. When we looked back, the gelatinous layer had been transposed onto the gravel drive, the cars, the jockey, Frankie’s house, and everything beyond and it felt awfully sad like really saying goodbye whereas normally the sadness only comes later.”
The “rubber cement” of the heat mirage represents the cousins’ loss of innocence. Although they don’t know why life will be “an entirely different place” on the other side of this afternoon, they sense an immediate change. Considering the ending of the book, it’s important that Travis, the oldest cousin, passes through this portal first: “The mantle wobbled, accepting him, and reset” (66).
The symbolism is effective because Bamford commits to her descriptions of the “mantle.” Throughout the novel, she refers to the phenomenon in the following ways:
“The tree line glistened fatly” (65)
“The mantle wobbled” (66)
“Everything encased in the mantle . . . [was] trapped behind an excessive amount of high-gloss shellac like that apple in Snow White” (66)
“the varnished scene” (81)
“the gelatinous layer” (82)
“wet rubber cement” (82)
The variety, precision, and sheer creativity of Bamford’s descriptions create an eerie, unsettling image.
Creative Writing
Poetry: The cousins’ have heard the story of their grandmother’s house burning down, but they see the remains for the first time on this fateful June afternoon. Bamford marks the moment with a concrete poem, or a poem where words are arranged to represent an idea in the poem. Her poem is a single sentence, “But really the sun is a dish on which no food is served”, circling a large O. Writing poetry can feel intimidating, but think of it like a sentence, as Bamford does.
Select an object near you: a mug, a piano, a chair, a tree. In a sentence (or more, if you choose), capture the essence of that thing. What does it represent? What does it mean to you? Once you have the idea captured, play with the arrangement of the words so they visually represent the object itself.
Nonfiction: The narrator of Idle Grounds uses movies to draw comparisons. Hook and Amélie are both featured in the novel. The narrator says, “The reason I bring up Amélie is that it would have been good to have found that sort of box [that Amélie finds] at the childhood home, maybe nestled in a tree or something, because there was no way we were going inside” (94).
What movie held significance to you as a child? Or, what movie did you watch as an adult that helped you better understand something from your childhood? Reflect on your connection to a film.
Sentence Study
Bamford opens this novel with this declaration:
“The following is an account of an afternoon in June in which we sallied forth and then for the most part back.”
Right away, Bamford sets the stage for some sort of loss. The first sentence, with its formal “The following account,” almost sounds like a legal document. That phrase, in its seriousness, prepares readers for the impending loss implied at the end of the sentence. Although Bamford doesn’t reveal the scale of the loss, she lets us know from the beginning that the cousins only return from their adventures “for the most part.” It’s unclear if the change is emotional, physical, or both, but it’s an immediate hook into the story.
