Fleur de Leigh in Exile
A Novel
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Diane Leslie's first novel, Fleur de Leigh's Life of Crime, chronicled young Fleur Leigh's glamorous misadventures in 1950s Hollywood. "Très charmant indeed," Entertainment Weekly praised this Library Journal and Los Angeles Times Best Book of 1999.
Fleur de Leigh in Exile finds fifteen-year-old Fleur in diminished circumstances. She transferred mid-semester to Tucson's Rancho Cambridge West -- the cheapest boarding school in all the United States -- where frail students convalesce in the arid clime and dine on the mess hall's "adobe melt." "Think of yourself as a conquistador," her B-movie actress mother urges, but Fleur's eyes are widened to the evils of prejudice and the burdens of combating it.
After a night of dorm-room high jinks, Fleur and friends band together as the "Four-Letter Four." Sentenced to a civic-minded punishment deep in the desert, the "doomed do-gooders" encounter a grave situation far removed from Fleur's upper-class upbringing. Serious issues abound, but in Diane Leslie's world even the most painful moments are tinged with comedy.
Diane Leslie's writing is "enchanting, believable, and wickedly funny" (Denver Post). Witty and fresh, Fleur de Leigh in Exile pits Heartland against Hollywood in a tale whose courageous heroine is as endearing in exile as ever before.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spunky Fleur de Leigh, star of Leslie's Fleur de Leigh's Life of Crime, narrates the next installment of her eventful life as the child of Hollywood has-beens in the early 1960s. Fleur is the often neglected but irrepressible daughter of Charmian, erstwhile star of The Charmian Leigh Radio Mystery Half Hour, and Maurice, a producer single-mindedly determined to relaunch his wife's career. The teenager is sent to boarding school, where she hopes to fulfill the "all-embracing desire that I'd nurtured for most of my 15 years: to live with normal, amicable people from America's heartland." Alas, the word normal doesn't exactly apply at Rancho Cambridge West, a Tucson school attended by 40 oddball students and staff. Mr. Prail, the preternaturally tall headmaster who resembles Abe Lincoln, dreams of what else? appearing in the movies as Abe Lincoln. The ineffectual study hall monitor, Mr. St. Cyr, stumbles through his duties in an alcoholic haze, while all the students besides Fleur suffer from health problems that Arizona's arid climate is supposed to cure. Fleur cheers up when she's joined at the school by her glamorous and delinquent best friend Daisy, fresh from a spell at Swiss boarding school and calling herself Twyla Flint. Fleur also makes friends with Melly, the daughter of garment workers from Newark, N.J., and suffers a series of misadventures, including the discovery that the student body is anti-Semitic and the "rescue" of a migrant worker's TB-infected baby, as well as her first amorous encounter. Leslie offers a fresh take on class prejudice and a likable, often funny heroine, though fans of her first book will miss seeing more of Fleur's comically pompous parents.
