Nowhere Book Bingo 2025: A book with LGBTQIA-rep
CBR17 Bingo: Border (this book is all about a very drawn-out war with borders between the opposing countries constantly changing, depending on who’s currently winning)
Spoiler warnings for a 22 year old book. I don’t think I can review it well without revealing some of the more essential plot points.
Official plot summary:
It began as a sudden 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 lost brother.
But there’s a war on. There’s always a war on. And 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 and a vampire with a lust for coffee. Well… They have the Secret. And as they take the war to the heart of the enemy, they have to use all the resources of… the Monstrous Regiment.
Polly is a barmaid who pretends to be a boy to join the army. Not that the army has that many people fighting to join up anymore, since the war has been going on for as long as most people can remember. She discovers that you can go a long way with a pair of rolled-up socks down your trousers, spitting, and pretending to shave a lot. As she comes to discover, she is by no means the only woman who has pretended to be male to join up; in fact, as the book progresses, it turns out it may be harder to find actual men left in the armed forces.
My RL book club, the Dark Corner, picked this as our June book, vaguely recalling that it’s got at least some queer themes, and would therefore be suitable reading material for Pride month. It’s one of the Pratchett Discworld books that I had only read once, because I remember being a bit underwhelmed by it the first time around. Upon rereading it, it is a lot more queer than I previously remembered. We have lesbians (with a deeply tragic backstory) and there’s Sergeant Jackrum, who is clearly a trans man (also obviously not the only one we encounter in the story). There is also a lot of exploration of gender in general and identity in particular throughout the book, as well as a very nuanced exploration of the futility of war and the rather surprising way in which people might find themselves lauded as war heroes.
Full review here.
Bingo#1: Favourite – Murderbot, Red – The Change, Family – These Summer Storms, Border – this, Green – The Geographer’s Map to Romance