Carbonel was named a Book of the Month by Young Elizabethan magazine, as a "most sensible, it-could-easily-have-happened fairy story".
[1] The plot concerns a girl named Rosemary who buys a broom and a cat from an untidy woman in the marketplace.
Unfortunately he cannot return to his throne until the enslavement spell Mrs. Cantrip cast on him is undone, and so Rosemary, together with her friend John, have to learn a little witchcraft and track down Mrs. Cantrip for her, at best ambivalent help.
Carbonel has been said to have few real cat characteristics: he is more like Edith Nesbit's Psammead in Five Children and It (1902), speaking "with the voice of tart and faintly impatient adulthood".
[3] Another novel of Sleigh's suitable for the age group is The Snowball (1969).