Flower Children [Hardcover]

Maxine Swann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 10, 2007

From an award-winning writer: an elegant, lively, moving novel that portrays the strangely celebrated and unsupervised childhood of four hippie offspring in the seventies and eighties.

When Flower Children's first chapter was published as a short story in 1997, it announced the arrival of a new literary voice: it won every literary prize applicable (the Ploughshares' Cohen Award, the O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize) and was included in the 1998 Best American Short Stories. Now, Maxine Swann expands and continues that story, bringing its four sibling characters through to the other end of childhood, in a much-anticipated book that only Swann could write.

Based on the author's own family, Flower Children is the amusing, moving, beautifully painted story of four children growing up in rural Pennsylvania, the offspring of devoutly hippie parents. Impossibly at odds with their surroundings, the children find themselves both delighted and unnerved by a life without limits. A swing hangs in the middle of the living room. The children run free all day, dance naked in the rain, and go riding on ponies with the boys who live up the road. But as their childhood is celebrated, the freedoms their parents have given them have also compromised their innocence. In time, their world starts to collapse. The parents split. Puberty hits. The children are mortified by what they know and have seen. They long for structure, normalcy, restraint: the very things their parents have avoided.

Haunting and celebratory by turns, Flower Children is at once a portrait of childhood's unbridled joy and the story of a unique generation. Ann Patchett recently selected another excerpt of the novel to appear in the 2006 Best American Short Stories.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This wistful, episodic second novel by Swann (Serious Girls) is made up of vignettes about four sibling "flower children" whose parents are Pennsylvania farm country back-to-the-land hippies. Swann portrays the free-floating '70s coming-of-age of these four siblings—Lu, Maeve (who narrates much of the novel), Tuck and Clyde—who delight in running freely in the countryside, but grow embarrassed by the unconventional practices of their politically active, casual-dressing parents. Their parents, Sam, a Harvard graduate, and Dee, a gardener and artist, built their own house, and though they aim to raise their children in an ideal world "in which nothing is lied about, whispered about, and nothing is ever concealed," the parents separate, and subsequent storylike chapters delineate their children's sometimes rocky confrontation with the world of TVs, junk food and schoolyard cliques. The parents' transient love interests make impressions on the children: Dee's live-in boyfriend, Bobby, avenges the shooting of the children's dogs by local hunters; later, the children set out to rid themselves of Sam's latest squeeze, a glamorous but dim-witted psychologist. Swann wisely forgoes childlike stream-of-consciousness narration in favor of lean, direct storytelling, a choice that makes this more substantial and rewarding than the vast majority of coming-of-age novels. (May)
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Review

A spellbinding novel-in-stories about the progeny of Harvard-educated hippies . . . Swann evokes the wonder of childhood with an almost hallucinatory precision. -- Vogue

Hypnotic. . . Swann's writing is mesmerizing . . . readers won't soon forget the portraits of flower children struggling to bloom in a very different world from the one in which they were first planted. -- People (four stars, Critic's Choice)

I thought about this book when I wasn't reading it, and I looked forward to returning to it and delving further. I was left wanting to know more about this family of unique characters. Like a missing friend who lives far away, but visits regularly. Not loss, anticipation. -- Indianapolis Star-Press

Maxine Swann is extraordinary at getting right down into the warm, funny, surreal, and heartbreaking folds of childhood and family life that are so rarely captured. Her writing is immaculate and completely transporting: serene and lively, lush and bare, with that magical, seemingly effortless quality that only the very talented of writers seem to possess. I didn't want this book to end. It is mesmerizing. -- Eliza Minot, author of The Brambles

Maxine Swann's Flower Children is a work of stunning lyricism and intense originality. It tells a story many of us have been waiting to hear: what happened to those children brought up in the wake of the dream of the '60s. What is remarkable about Maxine Swann's answer to that question, is that it never shies from complexity, and speaks in a voice of astonishing power and texture. -- Mary Gordon, author of Pearl

Provocative . . . Swann deftly and vividly encapsulates the flip side to an eccentric upbringing. -- Providence Journal

Swann expertly handles the complex emotions of both boys and girls as they progress in age to adolescence and adulthood . . . Swann is a restrained, elegant writer, who lets her sentences build slowly, as if she were assembling a structure brick by brick. I nearly emptied my pen of ink underlining passages. -- Bookforum

[Flower Children] is full of the visceral pleasures and anxieties of childhood -- LA Times Book Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 211 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; 2007, 1st Edition/1st Printing edition (May 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594489459
• ISBN-13: 978-1594489457
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #990,155 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "They'll learn only the large things", July 20, 2008

By 

Linda Bulger (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Flower Children (Hardcover)

Although Flower Children is clearly labeled as a novel, it's more like a collection of stories loosely strung together. Author Maxine Swann writes about a family of four children raised in rural Pennsylvania in the 1970s by hippie parents. Most of the narrative is in the first person from the point of view of Maeve, the second child, though some chapters are related in the third person.

The parents, Sid and Faye, are well educated and come from wealthy backgrounds. They choose to live in a house they built themselves, with unconventional plumbing, a dirt floor, and pot growing under the kitchen sink. The children are free to roam the hills and fields. Their babysitter plays cards with her naked friends and invites the children to join but "they'd rather not play." Sid and Faye separate and then there are the lovers to be dealt with as well.

The children, especially Maeve and her older sister Lu, try desperately to be conventional, in the face of some very embarrassing moments with both parents but especially their father. Their younger brothers are lightly drawn and don't become distinct characters; in fact they almost vanish from the scene in the last sections.

The entire book is told with very little penetration into the children's "inner workings." The writing is beautiful, lyrical, but it's hard to feel that you really know or understand the characters. The reader could be watching a beautiful movie with the volume turned all the way down, or in a foreign language with no subtitles. How did Faye and Sid choose this path?

Flower Children is not an easy book to evaluate by the usual rules of novels, nor is it quite a set of short stories. The book starts well but the reader has an expectation of getting to know this family better and somehow that doesn't happen. This is the book author Swann chose to give us and clearly her goal was not insight or resolution but vignettes of post-Aquarius children. Maybe the medium is the message?

Linda Bulger, 2008

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great at evoking a very specific time and place, otherwise too ethereal, July 7, 2007

By 

Suzanne Amara (MA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Flower Children (Hardcover)

I could picture the world evoked in parts of this book very well. I grew up in a similar time and place to the children here---among hippies with kids and tough troubled natives of a rural area. I think the characters here are written to a bit of an extreme---the hippies are more out there, the natives mostly seem to border on psychotic or sociopaths---but I recognized the general picture. The parents, rich kids who rejected their background, are also fairly believable, yet again, done to extremes.

However, the book seems to me to try too hard to be artsy and ethereal. The point of view changes all the time---sometimes it's a "we" for all four kids, sometimes a specific kid---and this isn't really necessary for the narrative. The various boyfriends and girlfriends of the parents drift in and out, without always seeming to serve any role in the book. The children's personalities never become distinct, and their reactions to startling events never seem true to life. There are too many neighbors to keep track of, each with a tiny cameo. In general, the book is a bit of a mess---a pretty mess, an interesting mess partly, but a mess, like the father's apartment always is.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fitting In/Feeling Out, June 8, 2007

By 

Newsworthy (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Flower Children (Hardcover)

I'm kind of surprised by the other comments here. Not only is this book written with the thoughtful, spare, articulate skill of a poet, it also kicks up a plume of dust that engulfs and transports us into the interior worlds of memory. It doesn't seem to me that the book was ever intended to be a blow-by-blow narrative of a group of kids growing up. The writing has a much more ambiguous quality, and moves easily through different perspectives and voices.

Swann's writing is big on imagery. This is certainly one of her strong points. Whether it's a girlfriend's blonde hair, the texture of mud dried on skin, or the first stirring of sexual arousal, she really knows how to write the image sensually.

She's also adept at capturing the prismatic universe of interior emotions. Especially those of the children growing up in a world that is alienating and borderless. I especially love the sequence where the mother's new boyfriend takes them around cutting down trees to block off roads that hunters are using with no thought that this will also block the kids' school bus route in the morning.

Flower Children reminded me a lot of my childhood. Not that my parents were hippies; but I think that a lot of the free-ideas of the 70's trickled into the mainstream and led to a lot of suspect child rearing, all in the name of free love, which unfortunately translated into adult selfishness. That's my take, anyway.