Synopsis:

Ernesta Greene is an adventurous explorer endowed with arcane knowledge, unusual physical strength, and ravishing long midnight black hair... in her dreams, anyway. In her real life she is a headstrong and intelligent little girl of 12 who is currently bedridden while waiting for surgery to correct a congenital kidney defect. She is visited daily by an old family friend, Professor Alfred North Whitehead, who is tutoring her in philosophy while she must stay home from school. These conversation mix with the quotidian details of her life in her imagination and spill out into the novel that she is secretly writing.
Although he is meant to be teaching Ernesta the basic of philosophy as a favor to her parents, he finds that their lessons are more conversation than lecture. While he works to prepare for his Gifford lectures, the new philosophy that he is formulating leaks into their discussions, and he finds that Ernesta's questions and ideas give him a fresh perspective. Now compelled to explain them to a child, his ideas become clearer to himself. Ernesta struggles with the great philosophical questions about God, love, evil, the purpose of life, and the afterlife. To her, however, they aren't grand, abstract ideas, but keys to helping her understand her illness and the reason that she feel so restricted by her family and society.
When Professor Whitehead describes the basic concepts of his philosophy, Ernesta can't help but picture them as people, places, and creatures, integrating them into her personal fantasy world. Bedridden, with nothing else to occupy her, she fills a journal with her story. Her alter-ego, Evangeline, lives in the land of Relationalia and works for the Order of the Consequent Nature. Her job is to scour the world looking for “that which can be saved” from the wreckage of history and bring it back to the mystics who work for the Order of the Primordial Nature. No one knows exactly how, but they help as the Godhead integrates the past into the everpresent, ensuring the possibility of the future. This future is constantly in danger, however, of being eaten by those who serve the dark Lord Stagnancy. Evangeline must put her work on hold and start a search of another kind when she receives new that her love, Eric, is missing and presumed dead. He is a pilot in the Initial Aim Force, delivering God's possibilities to the world and fighting Stagnancy to ensure the survival of the future.
Whitehead remembers this little book, which Ernesta gave to him after she recovered from her surgery and their philosophy lessons ended, many years later when he receives news that Ernesta, at the age of 21, committed suicide. After the return of her illness, a romantic entanglement, and an academic disappointment, Ernesta had become overtaken by despair. Before shooting herself, she had also burned all of her personal papers. Her mother was distraught, and Whitehead thinks that sending this book to her might give her some measure of comfort. He, however, struggles with how this tragedy, like all tragedies, fits into his philosophical worldview.
These three story-lines are interwoven, contrasting Ernesta as a child, her idealized self, and the realities that she must struggle with as a young woman. Whitehead's, philosophy, too, is explored on three levels simultaneously, the abstract and prosaic, the imaginative narrative, and the practical application.