The novel Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford captures a child’s perspective in this brief novel with minimal details, minimal plot, minimal characterization. A few lovely passages describe a summer afternoon of childhood play while adults sit on porch, drinking and ignoring their children.
The writing has a dreamlike quality, rambling about an afternoon for a group of cousins. The memory could belong to one individual or the collective. The setting is an unmarried aunt’s home, with a small patch of woods nearby, somewhat familiar but leaving plenty of strange questions that go unanswered. The children are both hyper and bored together, inventing challenges. The exact number of cousins is unknown. Only four “main players,” those who happen to be older or admired, are named. Others, including the narrator, are regarded as unimportant and also-rans, blurring together like a watercolor, an exact count never given.
The vague setting, the lack of names and details, creates an atmosphere of unease: “We didn’t know what to hope for, thing or nothing. Thing meant that our day, only somewhat extraordinary, would become truly remarkable… It opened things up in ways both surprising and permanent. Nothing, on the other hand, meant that we would need to go downstairs eventually an get ourselves a 7UP, start thinking about the 9 times tables or something along those lines.”
Accuracy is constantly in question as the unnamed narrator relays childhood memories that mostly center on one afternoon. A brother is sure his 3-year-old sister has gone missing and the group sets out to search. The children switch quickly from cooperation to competition, compassion to cruelty. Clues about family disappointments and failures abound in overheard snippets of adult conversations, old photographs and claims over a mother's possessions.
The afternoon stretches out expansively, foreshadowing adult outcomes for the four named characters, and these adult careers and relationships are relegated to a few pages, meaningless when stacked next to that strange and adventuresome afternoon. Still, the novel delivers little in the way of suspense or motivation. The older children fail to escape the influences of a dysfunctional extended family. Not by chance, Abi, the youngest child labeled as “missing,” achieves success as an artist. No trying to tag along for her. Age, stealth and an ability to vanish in that crowd of cousins lend protective distance from troubled family members.
The book leaves many unanswered questions, and readers will give up caring. One afternoon does not make a life. The quest promises thrill but in the end the lingering memory and novel seem pointless. Children who flourish shake off childhood labels, anxieties and family issues. They move on and take control of the life they have now.
Finally, the publisher made a terrible mistake by describing the novel as “a warped Nancy Drew detective story.” The phrase may have snagged a few readers who became readers with that series, but the false promise is sure to leave deep disappointment. There is no mystery, spunk or resolution.