Flower Children - Hardcover

Swann, Maxine

2.82

1,036 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594489459 ISBN 13: 9781594489457

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 2007

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A full-length work inspired by the multiple award-winning short story follows the experiences of four siblings as they grow up in rural Pennsylvania under the guidance of devoutly hippie parents who believe in life without limits, a situation that involves innocence-compromising freedoms.

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About the Author:

Maxine Swann is the author of Serious Girls,Flower Children, for which she received the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The Foreigners. She has also been awarded the Ploughshares' Cohen Award for best fiction of the year, an O. Henry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize, and her work has been included in The Best American Short Stories of 1998 and 2006. Swann, who has also lived in Paris and Pakistan, has been living in Buenos Aires since 2001.

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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