I was originally going to be harsher on this one, but the printing that I have has an afterward from the author that was basically like, "look, I wrote this a few years ago, and there are some things I would change if I were to do it again," and I appreciated that. They were mostly points that I agreed I would've liked to have seen changed.

Basically a war correspondent for a newspaper gets sent to the frontlines of a war in an alternate world with roughly mid-19th century technology. He gets separated from the army and gets captured by the anarchist rebels up in the mountains that his country has been fighting against, and starts to learn about their side. There's no magic or elves or anything like that, but I'd still classify this as fantasy because there is a ton of worldbuilding going on, even if it's largely mundane and comparable to our own history. Also this journalist is gay, which was a fun little surprise for me (and was actually plot-relevant at one point without involving homophobia, so kudos for that as well).

It made sense to make the protagonist a journalist because this is exactly the kind of character who would be naturally inquisitive and equipped to ask guiding questions in a conversation. And boy were there a lot of conversations. It felt like the protagonist had a one-on-one interview with almost every character that revealed another tidbit of this culture he found himself immersed in. My biggest gripe with the book was that sometimes the agenda of depicting an idealized anarchist society without a central government, currency, or military got in the way of the actual plot. At times it felt like characters were introduced specifically to bring up another example of how this culture would deal with a conceptual problem like the lack of a prison system or how to handle murder if there are no police.

Still, it was a fun take on an alternate-history military fiction with tons of worldbuilding (and I especially liked that language barriers often came up and were relevant between characters of different countries). And while I never usually mention this kind of thing in reviews, I think this was one of my favorite physical books I've ever read. The size, the feel and look of the cover, the font sizes and types, the page layout and chapter headers: it was just a very nice physical product. The publisher did a really nice job.