Julia lives in Berkeley, California, during the 1920s in a neighborhood of stately older clapboard homes. The house in which twelve-year-old Julia lives with her mother and brother has been divided into three apartments. The apartment that Mr. and Mrs. de Rizzio, the landlords, live in has an aviary. Mrs. de Rizzio's father, whom Julia affectionately calls Daddy Chandler, lives in the small attic apartment, where he writes about his mother and her friend, a famous dancer in mid-nineteenthcentury San Francisco. Julia loves her own small "room made of windows" because it is her first private space since her father's death in World War I. Although the room is quite small and really meant to function as a sewing room off her mother's bedroom, Julia basks in the atmosphere created by the windows on two sides, a glass door leading to a small balcony on the other side...