The true test for the hippie kids of “Flower Children” is not their parents’ divorce, nor is it dealing with the string of short-term boyfriends and girlfriends who woo their folks.

It’s junior high.

Raised in a cartoonish house with four rooms stacked one atop another, a dirt floor in the kitchen and a swing dangling from the living room ceiling, the children in Maxine Swann’s novel want nothing more than to fit in with their peers.

The parents protest nuclear plants and go skinny-dipping with friends, living their uninhibited lifestyles in full view of their two sons and two daughters. Despite lessons from these pot-smoking, free-love parents, the girls of “Flower Children” Riverhead Books, $21.95) have their eyes on popularity, cheerleading and good grades.

“To combat any weird rumors about our house, we tried to act as normal as we could,” occasional narrator Maeve says. “We carried combs in our back pockets, flipped our hair back, trying to imitate the cooler girls.” Swann’s second novel is based on her own upbringing.

“Their parents don’t care what they do. They’re the luckiest children alive!” the opening chapter says. “They run out naked in storms. They take baths with their father, five bodies in one tub.”

The first chapter of “Flower Children” is Swann’s award-winning story of the same name. The book ends with another similarly structured chapter that Swann also published separately as a short story to critical acclaim. Those chapters, while tightly written and lyrical, don’t flow well with the heart of the novel: how these kids adapt to, reject and come to somewhat embrace their parents’ hippie lifestyles.

When the children’s mother drives them from Pennsylvania to Tennessee after the Three Mile Island disaster, the kids delight in watching television in a cheap motel room.

But Maeve is unable to relax: “I was worried about the tests I wasn’t taking and the prizes I would now never win.”

The kids go on trips to visit off-beat relatives, including an inventor grandfather who’s trying to create a speedometer for snow skis and a well-moneyed grandmother whose regular drink is a bullshot: beef broth, Worcestershire sauce, vodka and lime.

The events faced by these flower children are both comic and tragic, yet Swann treats them with detachment and from a distance. She switches between first- and third-person (using Maeve as her narrator) but the effect is more distracting than anything else.

But she raises a good question: What does happen to the children of the ’60s and ’70s after wide-eyed idealism gives way to reality?

At one point, the children’s father mocks an activist who’s protesting nuclear power and then-president Ronald Reagan. It takes a smart hippie to be effective, he observes, shortly before leading his children to crash on yet another near-stranger’s floor.