By: Valeria Parker
John W. Deveny writes under the name Jack Deveny, describes himself as an empath, and says he finds it easier to write from a woman’s point of view. That biographical note is worth holding onto as you read By Her Own Hand, because the quality of understanding he brings to Madeline Crowne, the army veteran at the center of the novel, is not the understanding of someone who has studied women from the outside and learned to approximate their interiority. It is the understanding of someone who has genuinely inhabited the question of what it means to be a specific kind of woman in a specific kind of world, and who has found in that habitation something more illuminating than his own perspective would have produced.
Madeline is fierce and capable and profoundly injured, in that order of visibility but in the reverse order of importance. She joined the army to escape an abusive home and was transformed by military training into someone capable of genuine heroism in Afghanistan, which is not a simple or a comfortable transformation and Deveny does not render it as one. The heroism is real and so is its cost, and when she is falsely accused of a war crime she brings to her response both the military competence that her training produced and the complicated interior life that her history produced, and the novel is honest about how those two things interact under pressure in ways that neither fully predicts.
Mira is one of the more compellingly drawn secondary characters in recent literary fiction about war, a survivor of Lebanon’s civil wars whose own damage runs deep enough that her capacity for genuine connection and her capacity for genuinely dangerous possessiveness have become difficult even for her to fully distinguish between. The way Deveny builds her relationship with Madeline through the specific recognition of shared survival before allowing it to curdle into something more threatening is handled with the kind of structural intelligence that keeps the eventual betrayal from feeling like a plot twist and instead makes it feel like the inevitable expression of who Mira has always been underneath the affection.
The novel’s attention to the ways that institutions shape the people inside them, and the specific costs of those shapes when the institutions themselves are compromised by false accusation and moral failure, gives By Her Own Hand a dimension beyond the personal stories it tells. Deveny is interested in what happens to individual human beings when the systems that are supposed to protect them become the systems that are hunting them, and the answer he arrives at through Madeline’s story is both sobering and, in the end, genuinely hopeful in the specific and earned way that hope becomes available after genuine reckoning.
The ending favors emotional resolution over easy answers, which is exactly the right choice for a novel that has spent its full length insisting on the full complexity of every situation it describes. By Her Own Hand is the work of a writer who takes his characters seriously and takes his readers seriously enough to resist the temptation of simplifying either.
If you want a war novel written with genuine empathy for the women inside it, that refuses to make heroism simple or betrayal clean or recovery anything less than the hard and ongoing work it actually is, By Her Own Hand by John W. Deveny is exactly the book that delivers all of that with grace and genuine literary ambition. Pick up your copy on Amazon today and discover what an empath does with a war novel when he is working at the full extent of his considerable gifts.
