Flower Children, based on Ms. Swann’s upbringing incorporates vignettes about four sibling, the children of back-to-the-land hippies (flower children), raised in Pennsylvania farm country, who find themselves impossibly at odds with their surroundings. The children find themselves both delighted and unnerved by a life without limits that allows them to run free all day, dance naked in the rain, and go riding on ponies with the boys who live up the road. but as their childhood is celebrated, the freedoms their parents have given them have also compromised their innocence. In time, their world starts to collapse beginning with their parents divorce just as puberty hits causing the children to feel mortified by what they know and have seen and creating in them a need for structure, normalcy and restraint: the very things their parents have avoided.

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 Sam (a Harvard graduate), and Dee (a gardener and artist). The book goes deeper than that though as it portrays the events faced by these flower children as both comic and tragic and reveals how these kids adapt to, reject, and come to somewhat embrace their parents’ hippie lifestyles.

Given that, it is not surprising to discover that the true test for the hippie kids of Flower Children is not so much about being raised in a cartoonish house with four rooms stacked one atop another, a toilet in the center of the room, or a swing dangling from the living room ceiling but their deep felt desire to be accepted by their peers. Lack of acceptance is hardest on the two sisters who deal with their parent’s uninhibited lifestyle of skinny-dipping, pot smoking and free love, while seeking popularity, cheerleading and good grades.

Swann’s latest novel presents parents, who aim to raise their children in an ideal world “in which nothing is lied about, whispered about, and nothing is ever concealed.” The author makes this point quite obvious and others might thing that they were the luckiest children alive as they are allowed to run out naked in storms, go riding on ponies with the boys up the road who’re on perpetual suspension from school and even take baths with their father, five bodies in one tub. However, this proves to be quite embarrassing and difficult for the young siblings especially as they are exposed to their parent’s transient love interests, skinny-dipping, and pot smoking while at the same time being denied TV and junk food.  

Overall, Flower Children attempts to answer the question of what happened to those children brought up in the wake of the free-love era of the ’60s. Swann’s answer to that question contains astonishing power and texture, getting right down into the warm, funny, surreal, and heartbreaking folds of childhood and family life that are so rarely captured. In essence, an overall moving novel that portrays the strangely celebrated and unsupervised childhood of four hippie offspring in the seventies and eighties while transporting the reader to a place in time when hippies felt they owned the earth.

[tags]book review, fiction, Maxine Swann, Flower Children, Hippies, 1960s, free-love, pot-smoking, peer pressure,[/tags]