From the Publisher
"A work of stunning lyricism and intense originality"(Mary Gordon, author of Pearl). From an award-winning short story writer comes this spare, lively, moving novel, quickly embraced by critics and readers, portraying the strangely celebrated and unsupervised childhood of four hippie offspring in the 1970s and 80s. Based on the author's own upbringing, Flower Children tells the story of four children growing up in rural Pennsylvania, impossibly at odds with their surroundings. In time, as the sheltered utopia their parents have created begins to collapse, the children long for structure and restraint—and all their parents have avoided.
Vogue
A spellbinding novel-in-stories about the progeny of Harvard-educated hippies . . . Swann evokes the wonder of childhood with an almost hallucinatory precision.
New York Times
Writing in lucid, crystalline prose...[Swann] captures the incongruities of the 1970s counterculture as seen from the point of view of a young child, the shifting attitudes the narrator and her three siblings take toward the adult world as they slip-slide from childhood into adolescence, and the incalculable ways in which the passage of time colorizes the past.
People
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. (Four Stars, Critic's Choice))
Bookforum
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.
LA Times Book Review
[Flower Children] is full of the visceral pleasures and anxieties of childhood.
Providence Journal
Provocative . . . Swann deftly and vividly encapsulates the flip side to an eccentric upbringing.
The New York Times -
Michiko Kakutani
Writing in lucid, crystalline prose that shifts back and forth from the first person to the third, Ms. Swann has expanded a short story that scooped up a handful of prizes (the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize and Ploughshares’ Cohen Award) and turned it into a small gem of a novel, a novel that showcases her eye for detail, her psychological acuity, her ability to conjure up a particular place and time.
Indianapolis Star-Press
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.
The New York Times Book Review -
Lydia Millet
Maxine Swann's new book…is a "novel in stories" that offers shimmering, episodic glimpses into the life of a hippie family in the 1970s—four children and two eccentric parents. The book's eight narratives follow the children through their lives at one- to two-year intervals as they explore, observe and are spirited away on road trips by their impulsive and bawdy father (whose girlfriends they slyly torment) and their more quietly rebellious mother (whose boyfriends they barely tolerate)…Though social and political frictions crop up, mostly between the extended family's genteel, old-money relatives and clueless interlopers from the outside, it's the father's movie-star personality that invigorates the collection. Readers may find themselves missing him in stories where he fails to appear…mostly the stories are light and appealing, conjuring the entropy of summer's end and of a dewy rural utopia.
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 2007 Reed Business Information
Library Journal
Swann won a bouquet of prizes (e.g., the O. Henry Award) when she published the first chapter of this work as a short story in 1997, so expect interest in this tale of the children of hippies raising themselves in the Seventies. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Hippies' offspring turn out to be as anxious and confused as regular kids. Swann opens with an idyllic portrait of four children running free in rural Pennsylvania: "They spend their whole lives in trees . . . they discover locust shells, treefrogs, a gypsy moth's cocoon." Their idealistic parents intend to create a new world "in which nothing is lied about . . . [or] concealed," but soon their father has moved out, their mother has a new boyfriend and the kids are attending school, where "they're mortified by what they know and have seen." (Most grade-schoolers have not heard their father describe the differences between the way their mother and other women make love.) The narration shifts from rapturous third person to the voice of Maeve, who chronicles the next five years with older sister Lu and younger brothers Tuck and Clyde as they negotiate the minefields laid by their parents' bohemian ways. Their talkative, feckless father gets most of the attention; in the best and funniest chapter, "Intervention," we learn that Dad's parents and siblings are as odd as he is. Their mother's mother, by contrast, is conventional and censorious; at her house, the children are embarrassed by their mother's earnestness and unconventional clothes. "Secret" examines Lu's and Maeve's relationships with other kids at school, including two brothers, big-city transplants rumored to have moved to Pennsylvania due to trouble back home. Though Maeve kisses the older boy a few times, class trumps ideals; she and Lu are sent to a better school to prepare for college, while the Kalowski brothers fall into petty crime. It's hard to discern what readers are meant to take away from this parade of disjointedchapters that reads more like a story collection than a novel. Swann's prose is as lovely as ever, but her insights here are less penetrating, her portrait of a hippie childhood vaguer than the razor-sharp specificity with which she delineated adolescence in Serious Girls (2003). More of a mood piece than a novel.
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