This was another of my Stone Mountain Library Sale purchases.

I’ve read maybe half a dozen Terry Pratchett novels, and I find him reliably funny, and one of the better male authors writing about feminist topics.

It’s nearly impossible to write about Monstrous Regiment without including any spoilers. The heroine of the book joins the military of her psychotic country, in order to find her brother. Unfortunately, one of the ways that her country is psychotic is that women cannot do any men’s work, and vice versa. "It is an abomination unto Nuggin."

Nuggin is the knucklehead local deity. He somehow issues new edicts on abominations on a regular basis, and they include things like the color blue, and crop rotation, and technology, and even rocks.

The other deity figure in the book is "the Duchess" — to whom everyone prays, swears allegiance, and whose portrait hangs everywhere, but who hasn’t actually been seen in 40 years.

Anyway, Polly, our heroine, cuts her hair, dresses up as a boy, and runs away to join the military. It turns out that everyone else in her regiment has done more or less the same thing. But of course, they are clever and resouceful, these little drag kings, and they manage to cuckold the invading prince — almost literally, and generally raise havoc and save the day.

And as they pull this off, it turns out that a lot of other people have been dragging too, and the invaders just want the psychos to quit tearing down their communications towers and are more than willing to share technology and help them learn better agricultural management, if only the psychos will quit attacking everyone.

The interesting thing is that although a few of the drag kings decided at the end of the day to go back to living as women in a more free society, quite a few live out their happily ever afters as men.

The book doesn’t get into sex or relationships at all — there’s some comic encounters with prostitutes and lecherous soldiers, and a lesbian relationship is hinted at between two members of the regiment, but left ambiguous. Which, unfortunately, I think is the only way this book could have worked. It would be interesting to see someone try it with the complication of authentic sexual tension between two characters.