Join Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member? Sign in.

 

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
More Buying Choices
104 used & new from $0.01

Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
Flower Children
 
 
Tell the Publisher!
I’d like to read this book on Kindle

Don’t have a Kindle? Get yours here.
 
  

Flower Children (Hardcover)

by Maxine Swann (Author)
Key Phrases: Bonnie Rider, Jesus Christ, Michael Melton (more...)
3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)

List Price: $21.95
Price: $21.51 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $0.44 (2%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Want it delivered Tuesday, July 21? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details
29 new from $0.52 72 used from $0.01 3 collectible from $21.95
Also Available in: List Price: Our Price: Other Offers:
Hardcover (Bargain Price) $21.95 $8.78 24 used & new from $2.24
Paperback $14.00 $11.20 129 used & new from $0.01

Frequently Bought Together

Flower Children + Serious Girls: A Novel + The Sea Lady
Price For All Three: $48.41

Show availability and shipping details

  • This item: Flower Children by Maxine Swann

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • Serious Girls: A Novel by Maxine Swann

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • The Sea Lady by Margaret Drabble

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details


Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

The Sea Lady

The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble
3.4 out of 5 stars (17)  $11.90
Promise Not to Tell: A Novel

Promise Not to Tell: A Novel

by Jennifer Mcmahon
4.3 out of 5 stars (87)  $10.94
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Díaz
3.8 out of 5 stars (397)  $10.78
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel

by David Wroblewski
Away: A Novel

Away: A Novel

by Amy Bloom
3.2 out of 5 stars (132)  $5.18
Explore similar items

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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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: 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: #499,001 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Inside This Book (learn more)

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Flower Children
94% buy the item featured on this page:
Flower Children 3.3 out of 5 stars (18)
$21.51
Serious Girls: A Novel
3% buy
Serious Girls: A Novel 4.6 out of 5 stars (17)
$15.00
Her Last Death: A Memoir
3% buy
Her Last Death: A Memoir 3.3 out of 5 stars (85)
$11.70

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
Check the boxes next to the tags you consider relevant or enter your own tags in the field below.
(1)

Your tags: Add your first tag
 
Help others find this product — tag it for Amazon search
No one has tagged this product for Amazon search yet. Why not be the first to suggest a search for which it should appear?

Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store

If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store. Learn more

 

Customer Reviews

18 Reviews
5 star:
 (4)
4 star:
 (3)
3 star:
 (6)
2 star:
 (4)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
3.3 out of 5 stars (18 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
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
Comment Comments (28) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
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.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
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
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.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
Ad
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Wow!
I grew up in the 60's and 70's in a traditional setting, only admiring hippies from a younger perspective. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Jean Marlene

3.0 out of 5 stars What's the point?
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... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Betty L. Dravis

2.0 out of 5 stars Very little character development
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... Read more
Published 17 months ago by D. Sargent

3.0 out of 5 stars Shifting Points of View
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... Read more
Published 17 months ago by rubyink

2.0 out of 5 stars My review
This books content leaves much to be desired, but the shipping and service were wonderful! It was in awesome shape.
Published 18 months ago by Mindy L. Studley

4.0 out of 5 stars Good story
This book was a good read; an interesting insight to growing up with hippie-type parents. Maxine Swann is a candid storyteller, and I look forward to reading more of her stories.
Published 21 months ago by Bonny

3.0 out of 5 stars Fun book, BUt Soapy
I had a lot of fun reading this, but I expected more historical fiction about flower children. Never-the-less, a good read. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Samuel E. Yulish

3.0 out of 5 stars Maybe my expectations got in the way?
When I heard about this book, I got really excited. Thinking that it might give me the kind of glimpse into the so called 'counter culture' that maybe I'd never heard about... Read more
Published 23 months ago by T. E. Stewart

5.0 out of 5 stars wonderful novella of rural hippie childhood
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,... Read more
Published on July 15, 2007 by Gregory E. Pence

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent read
This is great book - I read it for my book club and I heartily recommend it. Swann's description of her unorthodox upbringing is riveting and her writing is beautiful and... Read more
Published on June 18, 2007 by heidi

Only search this product's reviews



Customer Discussions

 Beta (What's this?)
New! See all customer communities, and bookmark your communities to keep track of them.
This product's forum (0 discussions)
  Discussion Replies Latest Post
  No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
  [Cancel]


   


Product Information from the Amapedia Community

Beta (What's this?)


Look for Similar Items by Category


Perfect Programming

Shop for programmable thermostats

Install a programmable thermostat to help reduce heating costs by ensuring your home is heated optimally. Shop for name-brand thermostats, including Honeywell and Lux, in Home Improvement.

Shop all programmable thermostats

 

Big Savings in Books

Bargain Books
Find great titles at fantastic prices in our Bargain Books Store.
 

Buy Three Books, Get a Fourth Free

4-for-3 Books
Order any four eligible books under $10 and get the lowest-price book free in our 4-for-3 Books Store. See more details.
 

Best Books

Best of the Month
See our editors' picks and more of the best new books on our Best of the Month page.
 
Ad

 

Feedback

If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, contact us.
 Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
Is there any other feedback you would like to provide?

Your comments can help make our site better for everyone.


Where's My Stuff?

Shipping & Returns

Need Help?

Your Recent History

  (What's this?)
You have no recently viewed items or searches.

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.

Look to the right column to find helpful suggestions for your shopping session.

Continue shopping: Top Sellers
Free
Free by Chris Anderson
Paranoia
Paranoia by Joseph Finder
My Soul to Lose
My Soul to Lose by Rachel Vincent
Glenn Beck's Common Sense

Conditions of Use | Privacy Notice © 1996-2009, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates