By: Jenny Johnson
There is a specific kind of literary courage required to write a female protagonist with the combination of genuine vulnerability and genuine ferocity that makes her feel completely real rather than conveniently sympathetic, to give her the full range of damage and desire and moral complexity that actual women carry without softening either dimension for the reader’s comfort. Jack Deveny, who describes himself as an empath who finds it easier to write from a woman’s point of view, has that courage, and he exercises it throughout By Her Own Hand with the consistency of a writer who has thought seriously about what it actually means to inhabit a consciousness shaped by experiences he has not personally survived.
Madeline Crowne arrived at the army by fleeing an abusive home, which means that military life was both her salvation and the institution that formed her into someone capable of the heroism she demonstrates in Afghanistan. That formation is rendered with enough specificity that Madeline feels genuinely shaped rather than conveniently capable, someone whose toughness has a specific origin and a specific cost rather than existing as a narrative given. When she is falsely accused of a war crime and becomes the target of a global manhunt, the response she brings to that crisis carries the full weight of who she actually is, a woman who has been surviving impossible situations since long before she ever put on a uniform.
The relationship with Mira, the Lebanese civil war survivor who saves Madeline near death on an Afghan roadside, is where the novel’s most intricate emotional work happens. Deveny builds their connection through the specific recognition of two women who have survived different manifestations of the same essential experience, the experience of a world organized around violence that they did not choose and that has made them into people they could not have predicted. The revelation of Mira’s double life as an arms dealer, and the gradual transformation of her affection for Madeline into something considerably more possessive and more dangerous, is handled with the patience of a writer who trusts the accumulated weight of their relationship to make the betrayal genuinely painful rather than merely dramatic.
Eliot Lange carries his own damage from a desertion accusation born of genuine moral courage, and his tentative connection with Madeline is rendered with the fragility of two people who have been convincingly taught by their respective institutions that trusting anyone is a risk they cannot afford. Deveny gives them both enough interiority that their relationship feels like a genuine encounter between two specific people rather than a plot-required pairing, and the emotional stakes of watching them try to reach each other across the damage they have accumulated feel genuinely earned.
The recurring imagery of hands throughout the novel is the book’s most consistent and most effective structural metaphor, anchoring the question of what we do with the capacity for both violence and tenderness that every human being carries. By Her Own Hand is an ambitious, compassionate, and genuinely gripping novel about what war makes of the people it shapes and what those people choose to do with what remains.
If you have been looking for a war novel that puts a fiercely damaged and fiercely alive woman at its absolute center and follows her through betrayal and false accusation and impossible love without ever losing sight of the complete person underneath the soldier, By Her Own Hand by John W. Deveny is exactly that novel. Grab your copy on Amazon today and meet Madeline Crowne, one of the most fully realized female protagonists in recent literary fiction.
