THE ORDEALS OF ELLY ROBIN

In Quaver’s novel, an orphaned musical prodigy is consigned to a children’s asylum before escaping and living as a hobo.

Six-year-old Elly Robin doesn’t like to speak and shies away from direct eye contact—traits that cause many people in the American West to mark her as “touched.” She’s also an incredibly talented musician, and plays piano in her parents’ vaudeville act, wowing audiences to the extent that she has become the troupe’s star attraction. She and her parents travel by train with the troupe from Omaha to Denver, through Salt Lake City, Boise, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Elly loves her music and is doted on by many members of the troupe. It turns out, however, that a killer is living among them—strangling teenage girls the last night in each city, before the act moves on. Elly sets out to discover who the culprit is, and uncovers their identity while in San Francisco, just as the earthquake of 1906 devastates the city. In the confusion, she’s taken not only for an orphan, but also for an “imbecile,” and sent to the Marysville Benevolent Christian Asylum for Unfortunate Girls, a brutal, for-profit institution where many inmates are taken as subjects for experimental treatments, such as electroconvulsive therapy. Traumatized and widely thought to be unable to talk, Elly nevertheless makes friends with 12-year-olds Hattie Limburg and Martha “Drooly” Dooley. For two years, her life is miserable, though bearable. Then tragedy strikes, and Elly escapes from the asylum and disguises herself as a boy, begging door to door with new acquaintances—both friendly and mean.

Quaver writes primarily from Elly’s third-person perspective, displaying an accomplished prose style that serves admirably both to relate the story and to evoke the historical setting. The racial and socioeconomic prejudices of this era are clear, but presented in such a way that Elly is mostly shielded from them. Thus, she’s given free rein of the train upon which the troupe travels, and happily visits her friends Smiley Hobson and Ah Lin in the “Colored Car.” It’s only during a street altercation, away from the protection of the troupe, that she hears Smiley referred to by a slur. Quaver respectfully approximates the speech patterns of uneducated and ESL characters, but does so in a manner that never seems cartoonish. Characterization is a strength of the book and is effectively realized not just in the person of Elly, but also throughout the troupe, the asylum, and the unhoused community she encounters. The story, which initially presents itself as a cozy mystery, takes a sudden and shocking turn when the earthquake hits. From this point on, Elly truly does experience an ordeal, and readers will be invested in her plight. However, they may lament the lack of a cathartic upswing—at least in this first novel in a nine-volume saga. A dozen full-page line drawings by the author help break up the narrative and set scenes.

An immersive, if downbeat, historical novel that captures both the wonder and wretchedness of the American West of the early 1900s.