As we age, our childhood memories can take on a dreamy quality. Are we remembering everything accurately? Are we creating memories from what we have been told? How do our adult perspective and knowledge fill in important gaps as we piece together the stories of our past?

Debut novelist Krystelle Bamford takes on the fuzziness of memory while honoring the impact of the emotions and the reality of familial complexities in IDLE GROUNDS. The book follows a gaggle of very young cousins during a full day of a family birthday gathering. Not only does this pivotal day change the family forever, robbing the children of a sense of safety, it lingers in the mind of the narrator as magically frightening and still full of discovery, joy and beauty before a horrific event.

"Bamford’s style is bright and clever, and the book is easy to read and challenging in the way of great literature. It is weird, wonderful and highly recommended."

The family at the center of IDLE GROUNDS has long been connected to the semi-rural land where Aunt Frankie lives in the house she built herself. On one side of her property are her horses; on another edge, past the driveway, are mysterious woods and the house where the family matriarch once lived. Beezy, an enigmatic and almost legendary figure to her grandchildren, looms large in the novel. Only one of the cousins, who range in age from about three to 14, ever met her. All of them are starting to sense or understand that their parents, Beezy’s five children, had fraught and even terrible relationships with her.

Beezy is just one of the topics of conversation that the parents and their partners discuss when they gather together on days like this. As the grown-ups talk, the cousins roam the house and try to catch sight of what is zipping back and forth at the edge of the yard from an upstairs window. Then, one of them, three-year-old Abi, disappears. Thus begins the primary action of the novel --- the frantic search for Abi and then for her older brother, Travis, who had been their leader and hero.

The search for Abi, and eventually Travis, leads the cousins across Frankie’s property and then across an almost mystical threshold into the woods and to other houses and yards. As they get farther from their parents and from Frankie’s place, they find themselves confronting uncertainties and dangers, as well as shifting loyalties among themselves. They experience pleasure and heartbreak from moment to moment.

The unnamed narrator speaks for all the cousins and through their own particular adult lens. Process of elimination gives readers an idea of who the narrator’s parents are. But for the most part, they are the voice of all the cousins. Yet, even as they begin as a group, the tragic day destroys their collective identity. This slippery viewpoint is just one of the interesting ways in which Bamford tells this surprising and unforgettable end-of-innocence story. In her talented hands, memory is both essential and unreliable.

Pensive and lush, yet sharp and funny, IDLE GROUNDS is such a unique novel. It is a story in which shadows, unrealized dreams, violence and the unexplained run parallel to the more mundane world of family drama and June afternoons. Bamford’s style is bright and clever, and the book is easy to read and challenging in the way of great literature. It is weird, wonderful and highly recommended.