I highly recommend Maxine Swann's Flower Children. It's a very quick read - less a novel than interlocking short stories about children raised by hippie parents. The narrative voice ranges from chapter to chapter - from the plural (we) to a third person narrator to the voice of one of the daughters, and though this kind of transition usually bugs me, it works here.

The book follows the children through adolescence - each chapter lights on an event or a significant moment. Swann has an elegant spare style that works beautifully in the first and concluding chapters that focus on the children and the landscape surrounding their home, but as she expands her vision to include other family members in the story, she is less sucessful at capturing that sense of the significant moment or important transition. Still, her failures are noble ones. I really admired the way she captured the way images of our younger selves erupt through the gaps of our memories like mountains in a mist.

What I liked best is there is no sense of passing judgement on any character - a lesser sensibility would have made a 'look how my hippie parents neglected me and fucked me up' kind of book. The character of the father, esp, who really is a mess and declines as the story progresses, is drawn humourously and sympathetically.

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I was intrigued by the cover of this book. I grew up during the same era, and the picture of the children playing (in 70's attire) took me back to my childhood. This is a fictionalized account of Swann's childhood growing up with two Harvard-educated hippies as parents. She and her siblings had no discipline, no rules. Their parents grew pot underneath the kitchen sink. A swing hung from the ceiling.
The story follows the four children from early childhood through the middle school years as they begin to come of age. Their parents divorce, subsequent lovers, and visits to their wealthy (and very different) grandparents' homes all add to the children's view of the world and their view of their parents as well.
I enjoyed this book. However, the switching back and forth between first and third person points of view was distracting. I'd love to know what became of the children and their parents in later years. (You know it's a good story when you are left wondering what happened later.) ( )

Heart Warming: I enjoyed this book a realty story. Fast reading, kept you interested all through the book.

Flower Children is a pretty good book, though it's more of a novella than a novel. Actually, it's more like a bunch of related short stories than anything else. That would make sense, since the book started out as a short story that was featured in the Best American Short Stories 1998 anthology. ( )

I’m probably the last person on earth who still remembers the hippie era as a time of great hope and optimism. Flower Children, like my visit to San Francisco last summer, is yet another nail in the coffin for the hippie era. Much of the story is told is plural first person, an interesting way to approach a childhood in a family of four children. The children grow up with two hippie parents, both of which come from very affluent households. There is no terrible secret or destructive action, but the children’s parents steadily deteriorate and gradually decline. It is a story that begins in great hope and slowly develops into a life of deep underlying sadness. ( )