Poor little rich girl has all the pluck

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a solid Hollywood hit must be in want of a sequel. Fleur de Leigh, Diane Leslie’s perspicacious 10-year-old heroine privileged in all but parentage, was too endearing a character to drop after just one book.

Leslie’s first novel, “Fleur de Leigh’s Life of Crime,” was a sort of “Nanny Diaries” written from the perspective of the poor little rich child of outrageously self-centered show business parents who hire a conveyor belt of caretakers to rear her in their stead.

Just as Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus skewer the Park Avenue denizens they baby-sat for in the 1990s, Leslie nails the narcissistic Hollywood strivers she grew up among in the 1950s as the daughter of a screenwriter mother and entertainment lawyer father. She creates a wise, sweet and perpetually forgiving little girl who lampoons her world even as she searches touchingly, chapter by chapter, nanny by nanny, for a parental figure to love.

“Fleur de Leigh in Exile” finds our French-punned iris, now 15, uprooted and bundled off to what she most dreaded in the first novel: boarding school.

Away from the fertile grounds of risible Hollywood, Leslie has her work cut out for her, and she’s had to irrigate this sequel, set in the Arizona desert, with campus capers and madcap plotting.

Once again, Leslie has tempered what could have smoldered into anger with her humorous, sprightly outlook and benign tolerance. Fleur has blossomed, becoming a greater threat to her vain, “Queen of the B’s” actress mother, who sends Fleur off despite her tears and pleas. And what a sorry, ramshackle school careless Charmian and Maurice have unearthed for their daughter. Rancho Cambridge West is the cheapest boarding school in the country, with the third-lowest academic rating. Most of its students suffer from respiratory or dermatological ailments and have been drawn there solely for the curative Tucson aridity. Trying to put a positive spin on her desert exile, Fleur comments, “At least I’d escaped Hollywood, I consoled myself. Here in Arizona I would fulfill the all-embracing desire that I’d nurtured for most of my fifteen years: to live with normal, amicable people from America’s heartland.”

What she finds instead is a world as eccentric as the one she’s left, with a lugubrious headmaster who yearns to play Abe Lincoln on the big screen, a nurse who shrinks from illness and an alcoholic mythology teacher -- in short, a new crop of self-centered adults. Unfortunately, none of these characters jumps off the page quite as vividly as Fleur’s beloved gardener Constantine, fat nanny Glendora, declasse Grandma Glo or her parents in “Life of Crime.”

But Fleur quickly meets two kindred spirits among the students, and is further gratified when Daisy Belmont, the long-lost best friend she pined for throughout “Life of Crime,” shows up. An anti-Semitic snob, Daisy has rechristened herself Twyla Flint. With typical snap, Fleur questions her during one of her many bubble baths, “Why would you want to hang onto your body oils but exfoliate your name?”

Fleur, after all, hasn’t shed the awful pun her parents slapped on her. This egregious appellation is used to hilarious effect in the first novel when Charmian introduces her daughter as “Fleur de” to her latest nanny. “The ‘de’ is silent,” Fleur says pointedly to Miss Hoate, who has just imperially informed the Leighs, “The H in my name is silent.” Without her mother around to keep reinserting the ridiculous “de,” much less is made of her name in this volume.

Glamorous, worldly Daisy, back from five years in Europe, sings her “chanson of woe” about her own neglectful movie star parents as she bides time until her 18th birthday a few months hence, when she can tap into her trust funds. She is obsessed with finding her biological father, convinced he will be her guardian angel. Meanwhile, in a delicious running gag, she constantly corrects her younger friend’s speech, advising her to say “rich,” not “wealthy,” “eyther,” not “eether” and “sick,” not “ill,” if she wants to exude class.

Fleur and Daisy, it seems, are not “flowers growing in the same field” after all. Daisy, a born actress, has sprung up on acreage closer to Charmian. But Fleur is as beguiled by Daisy as she is by her mother. It is her charming flaw that she never gives up on these egotists. She comments with characteristic wryness about her parents, “Nine times out of ten, when a cloudburst of trouble soaked my shoulders, they didn’t deign to hand me a towel. It was that tenth time, when they supported me, that lured me back to them.” Leslie keeps her plot spinning like the bottle Charmian mortifyingly sets into motion at Fleur’s 11th birthday party to generate her daughter’s first kiss. Stranded at school over Thanksgiving because her parents won’t fly her home, Fleur and her buddies go on a bender and a graffiti-fest. Their punishment is community service at a camp of destitute Mexican migrant workers. Poverty, bigotry and social injustice outrage Fleur in a way that her over-the-top parents never do. She develops a social conscience. Leslie’s heroine is the most pleasant, least sullen adolescent this side of paradise -- but she does have a backbone.

With this sequel, Leslie attempts a more linear narrative than in the episodic series of linked stories that made up her first novel. Her strengths remain her strong characterizations and deft ability to delight us with outlandish observations or unexpected tender moments. Far more than plot, it is Fleur’s engaging voice that carries Leslie’s books. In building toward its resolution, “Fleur de Leigh in Exile” flirts dangerously with overearnest sentimentality. But as long as Leslie balances Fleur’s righteous principles with her sharp eye for the foibles of the frivolous, this is one flower that is destined to become a perennial.