Idle Grounds

Krystelle Bamford

This reading group guide for Idle Grounds includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

From the window of their aunt’s house above a family party, a group of children watch something mysterious moving at the edge of the forest. It’s a bright, clear summer day and their parents are embroiled in a drama of their own on the deck, negotiating and renegotiating decades-old disagreements over cheese balls and beer. When the cousins somehow lose the youngest among them, they must set out alone, searching through the house, across the grounds, and, eventually, the forest that was once part of their domineering late grandmother’s property. But as their search deepens and the afternoon unravels, their quest and the woods around them become stranger than they could ever have imagined, undermining everything they thought they knew about themselves, and who and where they came from.

A twist on the classic kid-detective novel, Idle Grounds is both a delightful mystery and a hair-raising examination of family secrets, wealth, and the vagaries of privilege.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. The novel is written almost entirely in the collective first-person. What effect did this have on your reading experience? How do you imagine the novel would read differently if it were told from a first-person or third-person perspective?

2. Revisit the foreword, which considers the feeling of unfairness that surrounds sudden tragedy: “It’s the shock of the thing, is what I’m saying, and my new and somewhat untested theory is that when something is shocking it also seems unfair even when it isn’t.” How does this inform your understanding of the tragedy at the end of the novel? Are there other parallels between the family of the novel and the Romanov family?

3. How is the author able to establish what kind of family this is—who they are politically, how much wealth they have or have had as a family, what their social lives are like—despite being circumscribed by a child’s limited, warped perspective? What do these things look like to a child? Choose a few moments from the first few chapters to discuss with the group.

4. What do you make of this first passage that addresses Beezy (pages 11–12), how she remains the center of gravity of the parents’ conversations? Now that you’ve finished the novel, what kind of upbringing does it seem like the cousins’ parents had? How would you characterize the central dilemmas and tensions of the parents’ upbringing? In contrast, how would you characterize the central problems of the cousins’ upbringings?

5. The description of the day being “bright and clean” is a repeated refrain throughout the novel, particularly in the first chapter. Similarly, the sun and clear sky become significant symbols throughout the novel. What do you make of this? What do these things seem to signify? Are there other symbols or motifs that you picked up on? Discuss with the group.

6. The jockey, a racist caricature, holds much significance for the family and is a fraught symbol for the cousins, though they’re not quite sure why, or of what. Initially, the cousins say, “No one knew where the jockey with the lantern came from . . . one day the jockey was coming to live with one of us. It was traveling toward us at an undetermined speed, though which one of us would be chosen it was impossible to predict; only the fact of its arrival was certain” (15). Later, the narrative voice says, “though we probably didn’t put it this way to ourselves in that moment, I think we could feel the ripple this rotten thing made and that it would carry us along if we let it, which we probably would, not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings” (164). What is being broached here? What feelings are you sensing from the cousins about this? How does this relate to the mysteries and stakes of the larger novel—the explicit and implicit dynamics that the cousins are picking up on and articulating?

7. “Kids, despite obliviousness to many things like etiquette and social cues, are hugely in tune with sadness, especially their parents’” (35). Pick a passage in the novel that shows the kids' attunement to the emotional truth of something, whether it be a moment, an object, or a conversation—despite their lack of understanding of etiquette, social cues, or social/cultural context—and discuss with the group.

8. Consider the idea on page 36 that “sadness” recasts all the events that came before it, “infecting” the past. How do you see this happening throughout the novel, which recounts a day that ends in a defining tragedy for the cousins? In what ways does the narrative voice recapitulate this sort of inescapable, infectious sadness; in what ways does it break free of it, if at all?

9. Throughout the novel, the narrative voice breaks away from the events of the novel and offers some perspective, primarily hints about the cousins’ futures as adults. For example: “We were thinking too much like ourselves and not enough like Abi, who was perhaps, it was dawning on us, a subtler kind of person. . . . This was our first hint that we would not be artists, not one of us. . . . Do you remember when you first knew?” (47–48). In the same vein, sometimes the narrative voice goes from the collective voice (“we”) to the singular (“I”). What effect do these variations in the narrative mode have on you? How do they alter your reading experience?

10. We first come across the mantle on page 55: “It was only a thing you could feel, which was thickness like a layer of translucent fat over an otherwise ordinary scene. Or a snail’s glutinous mantle.” What do you think the mantle is? What do you make of the fact that the cousins are sure that their parents wouldn’t notice it?

11. Revisit Chapter 10, “Childhood Home.” What seems to be at play in the cousins’ reaction to the current occupant of what they’re convinced is their parents’ childhood home? Does it matter, ultimately, whether this was their parents’ childhood home? What nascent or implicit feelings seem to be being stoked here?

12. Consider the end of Chapter 12, “Cemetery.” What is the big revelation of this chapter? In the wake of it, the narrative voice says: “What were we doing again? We were looking at things. . . . We were thinking about the nature of loyalty and disloyalty. . . . Was that it? Was that all? Surely not. Surely, we were looking for something. We had lost something and were here to retrieve it. We were here to bring it back home” (115). What started as an expedition into the woods to find Abi has turned into something much larger. What are the kids now realizing that they’ve stumbled on? What has been lost? By whom? What, in the end, do the kids bring home with them?

13. The final Intermezzo returns to the Romanovs, commenting on the Fabergé egg that belonged to the mother: “I’ve seen photos of the egg . . . and while you’d think you’d open the house to find the kids inside it’s actually the other way around—the house is inside the kids, which must be, I suspect, how the mother had wanted it all along” (176). What are the layers to this observation? What are the many ways that the figurative house is inside the kids, as opposed to the other way around? What does this say about long-buried secrets, inheritance, and childhood decline? Is it always a bad thing, to be indelibly marked by where you came from?

14. In the final chapter, the novel turns to the unresolvable inconsistences and mysteries of the bright, clean day on which it takes place. Ultimately the cousins decide to leave much unknown: “the mystery was over and we were tired. To put it frankly, we weren’t up to it” (185). As the day and its unanswered questions—the mantle, the zip-zip-zip, the forest’s voices, their parents’ childhood home, etc.—draw inevitably to a close, the kids face down the rest of their lives outside the narrative unit of the story, the mystery of this one day. Even as the novel closes, we can feel the questions that the central “mystery” has unlocked continuing to unravel past the bounds of the mystery itself: the conventions of the kid-detective story cannot contain them. What do you make of this chapter, and the kids’ self-consciousness of all that lies outside of the mystery?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Choose a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys book to read as a group. How does Idle Grounds play with the tropes and formulas of the kid-detective novel?

2. Read Frankie’s favorite poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” as a group. How does the poem speak to the novel? To Frankie, the poem is about “being brave in the face of adversity” (18). Do you agree? Why or why not? How does this poem expand your understanding of the novel?