Six-year-old piano prodigy Elly Robin enjoys what seems to her a perfect life as a vaudeville headliner. But in San Francisco her troupe is caught in a devastating earthquake, and when she watches the hotel containing her mother and father collapse before her eyes, something in her mind collapses as well. Next day, a child is found wandering through the city's smoking ruins, mute and traumatized, clutching her blackened doll. Convinced she is an imbecile, the authorities consign her to a dismal children's asylum... So begins P.D. Quaver's extraordinary multi-volume saga, The Ordeals of Elly Robin.