Carbonel is a children's book series by Barbara Sleigh

Barbara Sleigh

Barbara Grace de Riemer Sleigh was a well-known British children's writer and broadcaster.-Family and career:Barbara Sleigh was born in Birmingham, the daughter of the artist Bernard Sleigh and his wife Stella, née Phillp, who had married in 1901. Both came from a Methodist background, but she was...

, first published by Puffin Books

Puffin Books

Puffin Books is the children's imprint of British publishers Penguin Books. Since the 1960s it has been the largest publisher of children's books in the UK and much of the English-speaking world.-Early history:...

 from 1955 to 1978. Also published in the US by Bobbs-Merrill

Bobbs-Merrill Company

The Bobbs-Merrill Company was a book publisher located in Indianapolis, Indiana. Bobbs-Merrill was known for publishing such authors as Richard Halliburton, David Markson, Ayn Rand, James Whitcomb Riley, Walter Dean Myers, and Irma S. Rombauer. Bobbs-Merrill also published the early works of...

 from 1955. It has three novels, first Carbonel: the King of the Cats

Carbonel: the King of the Cats

Carbonel: the King of the Cats is a children's book by Barbara Sleigh, first published by Puffin Books in 1955, and in the US by Bobbs-Merrill, 1955. It has two sequels, The Kingdom of Carbonel and Carbonel and Calidor: Being the Further Adventures of a Royal Cat , making up the Carbonel series...

and two sequels, The Kingdom of Carbonel (Puffin, 1961) and Carbonel and Calidor: Being the Further Adventures of a Royal Cat (Kestrel Books, 1978). The first edition of Carbonel was illustrated by V. H. Drummond, and of Kingdom by D. M. Leonard.

Series plot

The plot concerns a girl named Rosemary who buys a broom and a cat from an untidy woman in the marketplace. When the cat starts talking to her she learns that she has encountered a witch, selling up to start a new career. Moreover, the cat, Carbonel, just happens to be King of the Cats, presumed missing by his subjects ever since the witch Mrs. Cantrip abducted him. Unfortunately he can't return to his throne until the enslavement spell Mrs. Cantrip cast on him is undone, so Rosemary, together with her friend John, have to learn a little witchcraft and to track down Mrs. Cantrip for her at best ambivalent help.

The first two books are more closely associated than the third. It has been noted that Carbonel has few real cat characteristics. He is more like Edith Nesbit's Psammead in Five Children and It

Five Children and It

Five Children and It is a children's novel by English author Edith Nesbit, first published in 1902; it was expanded from a series of stories published in the Strand Magazine in 1900 under the general title The Psammead, or the Gifts. It is the first of a trilogy...

, speaking "with the voice of tart and faintly impatient adulthood."

Cats (albeit non-speaking ones) also take a central place in Sleigh's stand-alone novel No One Must Know (1962), about children hiding a cat and her kittens from the landlord, who has banned pets.

Novels

• Carbonel: the King of the Cats
  Carbonel: the King of the Cats
  Carbonel: the King of the Cats is a children's book by Barbara Sleigh, first published by Puffin Books in 1955, and in the US by Bobbs-Merrill, 1955. It has two sequels, The Kingdom of Carbonel and Carbonel and Calidor: Being the Further Adventures of a Royal Cat , making up the Carbonel series...
  
  , ISBN 0-14-131973-9 (Puffin paperback)
• The Kingdom of Carbonel, ISBN 0-672-50350-6 (Bobbs-Merrill hardback)
• Carbonel and Calidor, ISBN 0-7226-5418-9 (Kestrel Books hardback)