Flower Children (Hardcover)

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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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (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 (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #530,506 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 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 (Avon, Maine) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Rambling, February 10, 2008

By	PPG "Interested reader" (Ponte Vedra Beach, FL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Flower Children (Hardcover)

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.

9 of 11 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 (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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.