On a New England morning in the late 1980s, a group of young cousins wander deep into the woods on their family´s property, drawn in by uncanny visions and the disappearance of one of their own--but the farther they go, the stranger their surroundings become.
Lingering at the edge of a family party, a troop of cousins loses track of the youngest child among them. With their parents preoccupied with bickering about decades-old crises, the children decide they must set out to investigate themselves--to the rickety chicken coop, the barn and its two troublesome horses, and into the woods that once comprised their late grandmother´s property. The more the children search, and the deeper they walk, the more threatening the woods become and the more lost they are, caught between their aunt´s home in the present day, their parents´ childhood home just through the trees, and the memory of the house their grandmother grew up in. Soon, what began as a quest for answers gives way to a journey that undermines everything they´ve been told about who they are, where they came from, and what they deserve.
Disquieting and delightful, Idle Grounds is a rich exploration of the interior lives of children and a gripping meditation on birthright, decline, and weight of family history. A fable of the distortions of privilege and the impossibility of keeping secrets hidden, this is a novel about straying from home--only to come back unraveled, unsettled, and irrevocably changed.