It was a special house, assembled stone by stone and brick by brick. 12 rooms, 7 fireplaces, a floor for each season. Horatio, the immortal who built it, stood in sunlight streaming through 52 windows and was pleased with himself. A perfect Calendar House, ideal for its purpose…

10-year-old Amelia didn’t want to move there, she didn’t want to move at all. When her parents insisted they had to relocate to care for her orphaned cousins, she has no choice but to go along with it.

Until Horatio appeared, introducing himself slowly until he was sure Amelia was the right person to learn his secrets.

The house’s secrets.

Soon, they were off on beautiful adventures, to pirate ships and glamorous dinner parties and the streets of Victorian London. Amelia had never seen anything so wondrous, and she wanted it for herself.

Horatio’s offer seemed too good to refuse: adventures with him, become like him, be magical and live forever.

Amelia spends most of the beginning of the story complaining about living in the new house. Like I’ve done before I won’t say too much about this book because it has a twist that made putting up with Amelia’s bad attitude worth it. That’s why I gave you that specific summary of the story above so I wouldn’t give away the surprise.

It’s always nice to find a book about a new subject. In this book that subject if calendar houses. A calendar house is when the houses’ architecture is influenced according to numbers of days in a year (365), weeks in a year (52), months in a year (12), days in a week (7), and number of seasons (4).

There have been many different calendar houses in Europe but from what I found on the Internet, most of them have been demolished. One of the last calendar houses built in the UK was called Avon Tyrell. It was built with 365 windows, 7 outer doors, 52 rooms, 12 chimneys, and 4 wings. See picture below:

The year 1752 was shortened by 11 days when Britain changed from an old-style calendar to the one we use today.