Monstrous Regiment recap

In the small, war-worn nation of Borogravia, whose people worship the increasingly deranged god Nuggan and the revered Duchess, young Polly Perks disguises herself as a boy to enlist and find her missing brother. She joins a ragtag squad of recruits under the veteran Sergeant Jackrum and the hapless Lieutenant Blouse. As the squad marches toward a losing war, Polly discovers that every one of her fellow recruits is also a woman in disguise, each with her own reason to hide. The group crosses into enemy-held territory and infiltrates a besieged keep, where they learn how hollow their country's cause has become. The Duchess, it turns out, has long been dead, sustained only by the belief of her people and speaking through one fervent recruit; and even Borogravia's high command is riddled with women passing as men. Jackrum, too, is revealed to be a woman with decades of concealed service and a long-lost son. Polly helps force the war toward an end and, rather than return to obscurity, stays in the army to change it, becoming a sergeant who quietly recruits the next generation of hidden soldiers.

In Borogravia, a small nation exhausted by constant war and governed by devotion to its unseen Duchess and the harsh, ever-multiplying prohibitions of the god Nuggan, young Polly Perks makes a dangerous choice. Her brother has gone to fight and stopped writing home, and women are forbidden to serve. So Polly cuts off her hair, dresses as a young man, takes the name Oliver, and enlists, joining a scrappy handful of last-ditch recruits gathered up by the loud, formidable Sergeant Jackrum. Passing as a boy among boys, she begins her uneasy new life as a soldier.

The squad's secret is that all of them are women disguised as men, and that secret proves to reach the very top: much of Borogravia's celebrated high command turns out to be women in disguise as well. The Duchess in whose name the war is fought has been dead for years, her authority a thing kept alive purely by the faith of her worshippers, and she makes her final wishes known through the most devout of the recruits before that belief is allowed to fade. Sergeant Jackrum is revealed to be a woman who spent a lifetime as a soldier, and is at last persuaded to lay down the disguise and reunite with the grown son he never knew. With the war's cause exposed as hollow and its momentum broken, an end is negotiated. Polly, rather than slip back into ordinary life, chooses to remain in the army openly, rising to sergeant and continuing the quiet tradition of enlisting young women who, like her, arrive with their hair cut short and a false name ready.