Deborah Sampson has a peculiar advantage: it has not been hammered home to her what she can't do, because there has been no one to care for her at all. Abandoned at the age of only five years and indentured to a farmer at ten, she must plow for her master and keep house for his wife; yet she receives books and encouragement from an unlikely ally. By the time she is freed at 18, she has earned the strength, skills, and education usually reserved to men. Tired of the virtual enslavement of women, Deborah disguises herself as a man and enlists as "Robert Shurtleff" in the war against the British; but soon she learns that discovery of her very sex could lead to execution—by her own side.
Arriving at the mountain fortress West Point, Deborah is assigned to the elite Light Infantry. Though she must not reveal her secret, she finds herself powerfully attracted to Will, a fellow soldier. She must serve side by side with him in the vicious guerilla war being fought between the two armies. When she is grievously wounded, it is Will who carries her to a French field hospital. Confronted by the French surgeon, she must struggle not only to survive her wounds but, at all costs, prevent the discovery of her true self.
In an era that makes women the powerless property of their husbands, Deborah makes her mark on the sprawling canvas of the War for Independence and the early decades of the new United States: imperiled by the crises of war, by the heartbreak of desire, by the stubborn insistence on being an adult who decides for herself and pays the price. A scrupulously researched novel of the life of Deborah Sampson Gannett, Supreme and Risky Fate tells the thrilling true story of the only woman to disguise herself successfully and fight as a Continental soldier in the American Revolution—but the freedom she's fighting for is her own.