Unlike the rest of her family, Pearl Wolfbane is neat and tidy and is delighted to note that everyone else in Primrose Drive - the street into which her unconventional family has just moved - is normal, too. She does her best to keep her room neat and tidy amid the chaos the others are wreaking.
When the Wolbanes' neighbours, the Rigid-Smythes, return home to No. 33 a few days later, Dudley Rigid-Smythe is horrified. He'd hoped to buy No. 34 and turn it into flats, but that's impossible now that it looks like a film-set of a second-rate horror movie.
The two families are set for a collision course, especially when it seems that each of the daughters is much better suited to living in the other's house.