This novel claimed to be a bold feminist science-fiction but instead was a sadomasochistic tale of a man stripped of his dignity and free will to be turned into free manual labour. for a community of lazy women. I'm pretty sure if the gender roles were reversed there would be a lot of very angry people. Whatever this book was trying to be, it completely failed at it.

Quite intriguing, if you are into dystopian novels, then this is one book to read. It me a while to warm up to the story and if there's one thing that worked for me was that I was interested in seeing what would become of Jonathan in the end and that was enough to keep me reading to the end. Thank you Netgalley for the eARC.

I do not read many dystopian novels, but I was attracted to this one as I understood it to be a reversed "Handmaid's Tale". And it was, in many ways.

The Fortress is a female-run enclosure with its own rules. The men that enter it are called supplicants and they have to leave all ego and demands and do what they're told by the Woman. Some of the men there are Isvestyii - the unredeemable, ie the psychopaths, the paedophiles, whom the society sends to the Fortress where the Woman has control over their lives.

The main character of this novel is Jonathon Bridge, forty-two, a corporate executive, cocky, determined and uncaring, with a beautiful wife and a child on the way. He doesn't think much about his work dalliances with interns and other subordinates, he and others like him, assume it as their given right to indulge in the young and willing. When his wife finds out, she kicks him out. The only way for him to have a chance at getting back together is to spend a year in the Fortress.

This novel had a very interesting premise. The world building was interesting, albeit I can't say I got fully immersed in it, but that could be because of my limited imagination. I was more interested in the whys and the how come. We get the answers in the last quarter of the novel.

I expected to really enjoy this - men being made to work hard, controlled in every way, including being used for sex by the women whenever and however they chose. Wonderful, right? There was something lacking though that prohibited from feeling much one way or another. The day to day workings of the Fortress and most of the middle part were a bit uninteresting to me. I was going through the motions but I didn't feel much, I was waiting for things to happen. They start happening much more towards the last quarter.

I thought the female characters in the Fortress were quite muddled, I never got a sense of who they were. Somewhat ironically, although the women had the power, the main character of the novel was a man. It was all the about Jonathon. Sure, he is a very realistic character, we all know men like him. He's the quintessential white, middle-aged, successful man, aka the man. There is character growth, which is the point of the journey.

The Fortress is an original novel. I found it a bit uneven, sagging in the middle, but the last quarter makes up for it.

It’s intriguing, smart, sexy and deftly handles some very difficult questions about privilege and power.