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Title: Half Wild

Author: Pip Smith

Narrator: Zoe Carides

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-03-17

Publisher: Wavesound Audio

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Wellington, 1885: Tally Ho doesn't need to go to school because she is going to be a fisherman or cart driver or butcher boy like Harry Crawford. Taking her hero's advice, she runs away.

Sydney, 1917: A burned woman is discovered on the banks of the Lane Cove River. Nobody knows who she was until the police find out a boy's mother went missing that very same weekend, and his stepfather, Harry Crawford, is not who he seems to be.

Members Reviews:

âYou see, the great thing about cities is, the more people you have in them, the more youâre left alone.

Or the more you find yourself alone in them at least.â

In 1938, a woman is hit by a car on Oxford Street in Sydney. Sheâs taken to Sydney Hospital where, comatose but aware, injected with morphine, memories come flooding back to her. These memories are disjointed, and it is difficult to know what might be real. The woman, eventually identified as Jean Ford, has Â100 in her pocket. She also has memories of being found guilty of murder and sent to Long Bay:

âWhat was it â almost twenty years ago now? â I was sent to die under a different name. I travelled to Long Bay Penitentiary like a celebrity, on a tram with tinted windows, ...â

From this beginning, Pip Smith writes a novel about the different and varied lives of Eugenia Falleni. Part of the story is told by Jean Ford in the first person, other parts are presented chronologically, interspersed with what may (or may not) be accurate reportage from the time. The first part of the novel presents a life of the young Eugenia, a life which makes some of her later choices understandable. If a girl had little power in the late nineteenth century, then a man surely had more. Eugenia Falleni spent over twenty years living as a man named Harry Crawford. And as a man, Crawford married two women and (possibly) murdered one of them.

âShe was just a half-wild creature who felt herself apart and different, who had grown cunning and furtive, hiding her secret and satisfying her needs.â

So many questions. So few definitive answers. Much of Eugenia Falleni/Harry Crawford/Jean Fordâs life remains a mystery. Ms Smithâs novel provides possibilities to consider: just how fixed is identity, how mutable might it be? And how very difficult it was (and still is for many) to live outside accepted, defined and prescribed gender roles. The many different characters who appear in the novel each provide a different perspective, another aspect of Eugenia Falleni/ Harry Crawfordâs life to consider.

I found this novel unsettling. Iâve previously read Mark Tedeschiâs true crime account âEugenia: A True Story of Adversity, Tragedy, Crime and Courageâ, but this is the first novel Iâve read based on Eugenia Falleniâs life. I was intrigued to read that it was seeing a police mugshot of âHarry Leon Crawfordâ who, after being arrested for the murder of his wife, was discovered to be Eugenia Falleni, a woman who had been passing as a man since 1899 which provided Ms Smith with the starting point for her novel. Iâve seen the same mugshot, and wondered about the lives, about the experiences, behind the eyes. In this accomplished debut novel, Ms Smith provides some possibilities to consider.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Loosely based on Eugenia Falleni's life..

Eugenia didnât like her name and refused to answer to it when her grandparents addressed her that way.