Customer Reviews

Flower Children

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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

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.

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.

All in all, a book with great potential that disappointed. Its rambling style, coupled with constantly changing point of view (sometimes written in 1st person, other times in 3rd) as well as a lack of plot caused this series of stories about a delightful, quirky family to fall flat. I forced myself to finish it. Each story, I hoped for it to improve. It didn't. Sigh.

I was quite excited when a friend gave me this book. As the child of hippie parents I found many things to relate to and the author was able to create a deep and rich interior world for "Maeve" (essentially the main character). I say essentially because the point of view shifts several times throughout the book--or rather collection of stories. While an interesting idea, I don't think that the 3rd person chapters were successful. You go from being very involved "with" the character in their crazy world to a dispassionate outsider. The last chapter especially left me cold--it really took me out of the story of these kids lives. At times this book is wonderful and has many 5 star moments, but it felt like the writer got in the way of her own story by using some "writer-ly" technique.

Publisher's Weekly writes: << 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. >>

Now, doesn't that sound good?

Well, it isn't!

Flower Children is beautifully written, but it's simple little vignettes of the siblings at play and "road-tripping" with their father after their parents are divorced. The stories of these very likable, precocious children are rather amusing, but not enough to carry a book. I kept trudging on through, waiting for something to happen. Something exciting and extra-ordinary.

But nothing ever happened, so what's the point?

Some would say the "point" is to depict the unorthodox way hippies raised their children and to show that these kids came out good in the end. That would make sense and be acceptable if there had been some action along the way. The most action was when the father occasionally brought one of his many bimbo-like girlfriends on a trip.

This book did not portray a sense of strong moral fiber on the part of the Harvard-educated parents, but it clearly showed their rebellion against the conventional ways of their elitist, wealthy, more shallow parents.

The one positive thing I saw in this book is that the parents loved their children and they knew it, and the children loved their parents. There was little anger and no violence, which is a wonderful thing. Love streamed through this book without need for it to be voiced; it was obvious. That's more than some families ever get ... and often, that's enough.

I like my stories with a beginning, middle and an end; this one had beginning after beginning ... no middle and no end, unless you consider the last chapter about one of the children's reflections upon returning to their childhood farm in Pennsylvania.

In kindness to award-winning author Maxine Swann, and to show she's capable of excellence, may I recommend her first novel, Serious Girls: A Novel. From the quality of the writing in Flower Children, I can see why she has won so many prestigious awards: The O. Henry Award, Ploughshare's Cohen Award, and the Pushcart Prize, to name a few. However, smooth, poetic writing and lovable (though undeveloped) characters is not enough. You need a plot!

My final thought: If this short novel were a painting it would be a water-color with deftly drawn, well-proportioned lines and figures, but with weak, limpid, fading colors. While looking at the painting, I would still pose the question: What's the point?

Reviewed by: Betty Dravis, October 2008
Author of 1106 Grand Boulevard

I grew up in the 60's and 70's in a traditional setting, only admiring hippies from a younger perspective. It was very interesting for me to read this book about hippie children and how their lives were shaped.

As fun as it was to read, as a parent it was sometimes painful to read about the kids' lack of boundaries. Ideally, it seems great and there are some advantages, but overall the kids seem to suffer for it. The author tells her life story very well, but she didn't give much of a clue about how she feels about her upbringing now that she's an adult.

I'd definitely recommend reading this book because it gives you a rare look at a lifestyle that's uncommon. The book is easy to read and doesn't take long to finish. You can decide for yourself how you feel about the Flower Children.

I found this book to be shallow and difficult to get through (despite it's small size). There was little character development and it read like the series of short storeis that it was created from. The first 50 pages were OK but then it just got bizarre. We discussed it at book club and there are another 15 in our group that agreed.

If you know what you're getting, this is a wonderful book. A novella expanded from a prize-winning short story, this sparse, evocative book transports you, not to a blow-by-blow, realistic account of such a childhood, but to a mood. Told from the viewpoint of a wise child, like Donna Tartt's "The Little Friend" or John Irving's "Until I Find You," you root for the kids against the irresponsible, unjust adults. Not recommended for education reformers or social scientists who just want data, facts, or objective reporting. The tone is mostly that of longing for a world-gone-by, not only of childhood, but for a special one, one perhaps impossible to re-create for any other children.

I first read this book when I came across it in the local library. I went through it quite quickly, and ended up buying copies as gifts for my sister and a good friend. Anyone who grew up in the 60s and 70s will recognize elements in this story, which reads somewhat like a memoir, although it is fictional. Maxine Swann clearly has a talent and honesty that comes across in her prose. The story follows the childhood years of four siblings who grow up in a 1970s hippy home with a charming, embarrassing, and eccentric (to put it mildly) father and a beautiful though somewhat befuddled mother. The children's points of view come across credibly as they move through developmental stages in which they either totally buy everything their parents teach them or start to reject the family quirks and traditions in favor of whatever might seem to be more "normal" or socially acceptable. I recommend this book; Swann is a hidden gem of a writer.