By Sir Terry Pratchett.

In my year of reviewing books, I planned to review Monstrous Regiment as my first Discworld review, but my mum was convinced that people would be a bit lost because it featured William De’ Worde and Sam Vimes. Later in the year, someone posted about where to start reading Discworld books. I’ll give you three guesses what they wanted to start with, and the first two don’t count.

Before I go on, I need to do a bit of housekeeping. I am about to go on vacation, which means that this blog will also be on vacation. This means that the next post will be an early start of my Halloween reviews with a review of Frankenstein on September the 28^th.

“It began as a strange fancy… Polly Perks had to become a boy in a hurry. Cutting off her hair and wearing trousers was easy. Learning to fart and belch in public and walk like an ape took more time…

And now she’s enlisted in the army and searching for her brother. But there’s a war on and whatever anyone says, their side’s coming off worse. Polly and her fellow recruits are suddenly in the thick of it, without any training, and the enemy is hunting them.

All they have on their side is the most artful sergeant in the army, a vampire with a lust for coffee and a readiness to fight dirty. And as they take the war to the heart of the enemy, they have to use all the resources of… the Monstrous Regiment.”

It’s Terry Pratchett, so at this point you know it’s going to be good. This book balances Trans characters and the truth of war.

For this story, I have 3 thoughts.

Firstly, Tran’s characters and a lesbian couple. This might be the most LGBT Discworld book. To start with, the lesbian couple from Polly’s point of view, she finds out that Lofty is a girl; she assumed that she joined the war to follow her man. Then, when it was revealed to her that Tonker is also a girl that is not commented on whether or not they are just friends. They are clearly in love, which is sweet. Now we get to the trans characters. When I was first reading this book, I wondered if this regiment was trans or if they were just wearing men’s clothes to achieve their goals. But then we get to Sergeant Jakram. A man who looks like a manly man while saying he’s not one, in what seems to be a joke. Then we get to the end. And we find out that he was not born a man but chose to be one. And in the end, when he finally leaves the army and there is no one to tell him who he has to be, he chooses to stay a man into retirement. If that is not a trans character, I don’t know what is.

Secondly, I would like to talk about the main comparison between the book and Roundworld history. Women going to the army: this actually goes back to the American Civil War. There were many girls and women who signed up. When they got caught, if they did it for the right reason, like for love or patriotic zeal, they were congratulated. If you just went because of the freedom and money you could get being a man, people called you a prostitute. You can see this range of reasons to join the army from wanting to get out of the life they are living all the way to the belief that the Duchess was commanding her actions.

Thirdly, I would like to talk about religion. There is a reason why whenever I read something in history where they said something is an abomination, I will think “unto Nuggan”.  I find it a bit of an interesting bit of world-building that everyone accepts that Nuggan sends down new things that are abominations. A lot of these things are destroying Borogravia. But what makes it even more interesting is the fact that Nuggan is dead and the abominations come from the hatred of the people.

Thank you for joining me in this little trip to the Discworld, and until next time.

Happy reading to all, and to all a good night.