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Flower Children

By Maxine Swann

(3)

| Hardcover | 9781594489457

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Book Description

From an award-winning writer: an elegant, lively, moving novel that portrays the strangely celebrated and unsupervised childhood of four hippie offspring in the seventies and eighties.

When Flower Children's first chapter was published as a short story in 1997, it announced the arrival ofContinue

From an award-winning writer: an elegant, lively, moving novel that portrays the strangely celebrated and unsupervised childhood of four hippie offspring in the seventies and eighties.

When Flower Children's first chapter was published as a short story in 1997, it announced the arrival of a new literary voice: it won every literary prize applicable (the Ploughshares' Cohen Award, the O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize) and was included in the 1998 Best American Short Stories. Now, Maxine Swann expands and continues that story, bringing its four sibling characters through to the other end of childhood, in a much-anticipated book that only Swann could write.

Based on the author's own family, Flower Children is the amusing, moving, beautifully painted story of four children growing up in rural Pennsylvania, the offspring of devoutly hippie parents. Impossibly at odds with their surroundings, the children find themselves both delighted and unnerved by a life without limits. A swing hangs in the middle of the living room. The children 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. The parents split. Puberty hits. The children are mortified by what they know and have seen. They long for structure, normalcy, restraint: the very things their parents have avoided.

Haunting and celebratory by turns, Flower Children is at once a portrait of childhood's unbridled joy and the story of a unique generation. Ann Patchett recently selected another excerpt of the novel to appear in the 2006 Best American Short Stories.

Critics

  • The Naturals

    Maxine Swann’s new book, “Flower Children,” 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 thr ... (read full critics)

    nytimes published on Sat, 18 Sep 2010

  • Flower Children By Maxine Swann

    Swann offers an impressively constructed narrative about a pair of hippie parents and the children they raise in the Pennsylvania farm country during the 1970s and '80s. The children, Lu, Maeve, Tuck and Clyde, grow up roaming the fields and doing as ... (read full critics)

    bookpage published on Wed, 15 Sep 2010

1 Review

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  • It started well but I found it hard to follow and couldn't keep the characters straight. Just couldnt finish the last 70 pages or so.

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    Branflakez said on Apr 27, 2007 | Add your feedback

Book Details

  • Rating:
    (3)
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  • English Books
  • Hardcover 224 Pages
  • Edition: 1
  • ISBN-10: 1594489459
  • ISBN-13: 9781594489457
  • Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
  • Pub date: May 10, 2007
  • Dimensions: 1161 mm x 839 mm x 194 mm Just how big is that?
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ISBN Edition List Sale Seller
9781594489457 Hardcover $21.95 $17.56 bn.com
$21.95 -- The Book Depository
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