Among them is a six year old girl whose distaste for speaking or looking anyone in the eye makes people think she’s “touched”–but who plays the piano like a young Mozart. Billed as “Baby Elly Robin, the Wonderchild,” she is one of the stars of the show.

The troupe arrives in San Francisco just in time to experience the city’s destruction by a devastating earthquake. Next day a small girl is found wandering through the smoking ruins, clutching her blackened doll, mute and traumatized. Unable to determine her identity (and convinced she’s an imbecile), the authorities consign her to a dismal children’s asylum…

So begins the first volume of P.D. Quaver’s extraordinary multi-volume saga, THE ORDEALS OF ELLY ROBIN.