Sweet child of mine; In her lyrical new novel, Maxine Swann describes the highs and lows of a hippie childhood.(Flower Children)(Book review)

Byline: Megan O'grady

Whatever happened to those girls and boys who grew up in the wake of the counterculture movement, glimpsed on the shoulders of their parents in footage of Woodstock and civil-rights marches? An answer can be found in Maxine Swann's forthcoming Flower Children (Riverhead), a spellbinding novel-in-stories about the progeny of Harvard-educated hippies (or "back-to-the-landers," as they call themselves) growing up in a Pennsylvania farmhouse in the seventies and eighties. Pot grows in the garden; a swing hangs from the living-room ceiling. The children ride ponies, dance naked in the rain, attend protests, and are never, ever disciplined. "The parents don't care what they do. They're the happiest children alive!" But unbound freedom isn't always exhilarating. The parents take lovers and even_tually divorce. The four siblings, two boys and two girls narrating in chorus, begin to crave normalcy. Instead, they go on road trips with their unraveling father and his wacky girlfriends, or make awkward visits to their extended family-on their father's side, genteel New England eccentrics; on their mother's, a grandmother who dresses for cocktails and is baffled by her beautiful, rebellious daughter's lifestyle. "She never not once tried to understand us," the mother says afterward, giving voice to a generational alienation that echoes through the narrative. The plaintive, determined voice of the ...