Product Description

A sudden burst of nationalism has swept over Polly Perks causing her to cut off her hair, don her brother’s clothes and join the local regiment so she can fight for her country. But there’s only one problem -- she has no idea who she’ll be fighting or what she is really fighting for. And why do they want her to have a rolled-up pair of socks anyway? War teaches you a lot, she finds, when it turns out that you joined -- the Monstrous Regiment.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #388043 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-29
• Released on: 2003-09-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 329 pages

From AudioFile
Terry Pratchett's hilarious prose is significantly enhanced by the narrative skills of Stephen Briggs. The story, another in the Discworld saga, highlights the recruiting efforts of a small country chronically at war with its neighbors. A rotund sergeant and weasely corporal sweep through a small town, and one of the misfits who volunteers to thwart them is Polly Perks, disguised as a teenaged boy barely of age. Briggs takes on the misfits and makes them shine. As the little group proceeds from one improbable adventure to the next, Briggs and Pratchett are magnificent. D.A.W. 2004 Audie Award Finalist © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Pratchett flexes his satirical muscles again, with the follies of war his theme. Polly Oliver has disguised herself as a boy to join the army of Borogravia, which is always at war and bursting with patriotism, though the Borogravians are often less than clear on why they are fighting. But then, as followers of a god who believes that cats, babies, and cheese are abominations, they are used to contradictions; they mostly pray to their duchess, who may be dead. Their latest war has interfered with the commerce of Ankh-Morpork, which has dispatched Sam Vimes to bring matters to a "satisfactory" conclusion. But Sam still thinks more like the city watchman he was than the duke he now is, and this confuses people. Meanwhile, Polly's regiment, the Ins-and-Outs, has become quite high-profile, what with having, it is said, a vampire, a werewolf, and an Igor in its ranks, and with capturing, quite unexpectedly, the Zlobenian prince and his soldiers, an event publicized by Ankh-Morpork newspaperman William de Worde. Anyway, they're suddenly popular in Ankh-Morpork, and they subsequently turn the war upside down, so that it doesn't end the way the propagandists would have liked. No surprise, of course, to Sam Vimes. Polly concludes that it is, on some level, all about socks. Thoroughly funny and surprisingly insightful. Regina Schroeder
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Review
“Like Jonathan Swift, Prachett uses his other world to hold up a distorting mirror to our own, and like Swift he is a satirist of enormous talent… incredibly funny… compulsively readable.” -- The Times