When a child is too full of questions about the world to go to sleep, her patient father offers up increasingly creative responses to his child's nighttime wonderings.

Ginny tries to reach and open a box using a chair, then a grappling hook, then a catapult, while the narrator suggests ways to keep her away from it.

Raised to keep her head down and not ask questions, when twelve-year-old Agnes befriends her older anthropologist neighbor, she begins to think--and write--about things from new perspectives.

"When Kevin and his friends discover a mysterious ladder, everyone wants to know what is at the top, and who gets to find out first"--