Gerald, Cathy and Jimmy wake a beautiful princess from her hundred-year sleep in an enchanted garden. It's really only Mabel, the housekeeper's niece - but the garden really is enchanted, and the ring she slips on really is magic! The children find that it takes magic to get everything sorted out.

This was a good story that I probably would have enjoyed as a child but which feels a bit shallow and a bit coherent on a first read as an adult. ( )

Okay so this is the one with the hollow statues. I remembered almost nothing else about the book since reading it as a child, and what vague recollections I did have were muddled chronologically.

The Ugly Wuglies came back to me as I read. I think they felt creepier to me now as an adult than when I read as a child (the creepiness reminds me of Frances Hardinge's books though hers are of course far creepier) while by contrast the hollow statue was rather anticlimactic compared to how it had stuck around in my mind all these years. ( )

Well this isn't as fairytale-like as the title might suggest. A very grounded story although still one with lots of magical happenings. Some of the smaller adventures seem a little similar to 'Five Children and It' which i've read previously but these are got through relatively quickly.
Its a very random/organic story, which on the one hand means your never sure what will happen next but can also make it feel a little pointless at times as you can't see the main aim of the tale.
It can get quite dark for a kids book in places, about on par with some of the scarier 'Doctor Who' episodes. Overall i like the mix of magic and reality and the strange turns the story takes. The eldest child protagonist also has some great personality traits. Odd but well written book.
I wonder if they stole from this for the 'Night at the Museum' films. ( )

Much of this is routine tale-spinning, but then there are the Ugly-Wuglies: Crude dummies put together by the protagonist children, and inadvertently wished into life. Nesbit makes them both comic and genuinely terrifying, and works some wonderfully inventive variations on the theme.