Fleur de Leigh in Exile
By  Diane Leslie

     You're the daughter of a B-movie actress and hypochondriac father who bemoan the lack of privacy when television interview shows reveal the shocking truth that they have a child. You are currently exiled to a co-ed Lord of the Flies-type boarding school where the thrill of the day is making out in an old wreck of a car on the school grounds, the school specialty is Adobe Melt, you have to help the gay Dean of Boys conceal his drunken binges, and you cannot wait to leave. If only your parents would realize you exist. This is Diane Leslie's exorcism of her own upbringing.

     Fifteen year-old-Fleur de Leigh, an irrepressible Shirley-Temple-with-an-edge, deals with all these problems, plus being reunited with her closest friend Daisy (who insists on being called Twyla) only to have to defend her new best friend, the truly nice Melly, against anti-Semitism.

     Left alone on Thanksgiving with her cohorts, she gets drunk and scribbles four-letter words all over dorm room walls…and somehow through that misdeed, finds her way to helping others. Fleur and her friends are sentenced to community service, helping migrant workers, and Fleur gives a tuberculin baby named Tesora (Spanish for treasure) the mothering she herself never received.

     Along the way she has her first tender encounter with young love with a disfigured boy named Brian. When her mother Charmian once again threatens to uproot her from her friends and her newfound responsibility, Fleur mentally takes a stand, but never gets the bitter "No more wire hangers" confrontations of the first novel. Charmian, for self-absorbed reasons relents and allows Fleur to stay until the end of the year.

     Fleur and Charmian make the most memorable mother-daughter team since "Carrie," and although we wish Charmian and Fleur's neglectful father Maurice would get an earful from Dr. Phil, we recognize our own subconscious wisdom about our own parents. Fleur's experiences teach her compassion for her own mother. To portray these nuances and to do so while making the reader laugh on every page is Diane Leslie's remarkable gift.