Flower Children

New York Times: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Coming-of-age literature is filled with characters who experience themselves as outsiders — as loners, nerds, misunderstood artists or uncool, uptight geeks. In her keenly observed novel “Flower Children,” Maxine Swann depicts four children who worry that their hippie parents’ unconventional lifestyle has put them outside the mainstream of ordinary life.

Their parents’ laissez-faire approach to raising children... all make Lu, Maeve, Tuck and Clyde yearn to fit in. At school, they’re surprised at first by all the rules but quickly embrace them:

“They learn not to swear. They get prizes for obedience, for following the rules down to the last detail. They’re delighted by these rules, these arbitrary lines that regulate behavior and mark off forbidden things.”...

[Author Maxine 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....