Synopses & Reviews
?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.
Review
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.
The New York Times
Synopsis
From an award-winning short-story writer comes this spare, lively, moving novel portraying the strangely celebrated and unsupervised childhood of four hippie offspring in the 1970s and 80s.
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.