Book 4, Forged in Fire: Destiny's Crucible

I enjoyed the story. I was disappointed in the ending. The reason is all the loose ends. It almost feels like one of those serials they showed in theaters in the 30's and 40's. Even though the author says he has wrapped this up, there are a number of things that remain outstanding.

Very good read. I liked the series enough to read it twice. Believable characters and plausible plot line. Struggles of main character to advance knowledge without being condemned by authorities is part of our own history. Good character development. Looking forward to next book.

Loved all 4 books. While i can see the end of the fourth book being a planned ending if there arw no further books. There are still plenty of questions unanswered. Namely one big one, i wont ruin anything, I hope we return to the anyar and get the answers to these questions.

An enjoyable conclusion to this saga, I hope the author continues in this universe if not with the characters. I highly recommend the first book if you are a fan of Least Darkness Falls and are stumbling on this book, and if you've read to this point then I recommend this book as well.

I’ve read many books and series in my 53 years - mostly fiction and science-fiction and this series is either the best I’ve ever read or tied in for first with two other series.

Hollywood should definitely turn these books into a movie.

Fantastic job!!

This was the best yet. The plot carries through from the first three books. Hopefully there will be more to come. The author did a great job wrapping this story line up but teed up potential plot lines for future books. .......Keep them coming!

It's not often that I find a book I can reread but with this series I'm starting again straight away. This is my favourite new series; I can't wait to see what this author does next, I'm sure it will be just as addictive.

Excellent story and characters. Fast paced and interesting story. Highly recommended for anyone looking for entertaining adventure in 16th century alt-verse.

Can't wait for the audio version.

5th Book Needed. I appreciated that the Watchers had a few paragraphs, and the mysterious blue egg shaped structures were at least mentioned....but neither were resolved. I spent the entire book enduring the preparations for war hoping that the last chapter would describe what happens in the next 50 years of Joe's family.

It all cultivated to finality in this book. I had been waiting for that fight for 3 books now. I wasn't going to be happy if it wasn't in the 4th. This book did not disappoint. We get to see the battle. ...and it's a good one!

If you are a fan of war novels thus one will definitely satisfy you. I only have it 4 stars cause personally I like more personal stories like the first book but there is no denying this is a good series. Looking forward to more

The story so far has a very interesting storyline. I love the idea of a person with modern ability being in this situation.
Sally... The book is pretty much nothing but conversation, discussion. There was a "big" battle at the end but if you grow bored with all the yap and start skipping, you'll probably miss it.
Sadly, I have no plans to continue the series. It started out fascinating, and turned into something else.

This review is for the four-book series. I read them over a period of several weeks through Kindle Unlimited. This series is self published by Olan Thorensen, and on that basis I'm going to rate it four stars. First, the good. The books are tightly editing for grammar and spelling errors. Over the four books I found a few typos. I was jarred out of my reading by the typos, but it was because they were so few and far between. I've read plenty of self pub authors who failed badly at editing their books, and Mr. Thorensen isn't one of them.

The another positive is that the author does the "fish out of water" concept pretty well. He explains who the protagonist is and what he's about and why the reader should care about him, and did it fairly early in the first book. That hooked me into the story.

Moving from positive to more neutral thing is that the story felt slightly derivative. From early in the story, I had echoes of David Weber's Safehold Series in my mind. In my mind, there's nothing wrong with a story being derived of ideas an author gets from reading another author's work. But one nit I had with the protagonist was his ability to circle so many development concepts to bootstrap the civilization to the next level. To be fair, I think Mr. Thorensen knew this was a "plausibility" issue and worked hard to explain how it was so. I don't want to say more lest I get into spoilers.

Why four stars, though? One thing that annoyed me throughout the 3rd and 4th book was that I felt there was too much padding. There were scenes that I felt detracted from the storyline and frankly didn't mesh well into the plot. The books, in those cases, could have been trimmed of the unnecessary parts and told faster.

But, here's the deal, these are still good stories. If you're looking for a meaty series that will provide hours of reading time, and you like the "alt history" vibe this story gives off, then read Thorensen's books. Time travel your cup of tea? I'd say take a stab at it, you might find you enjoy how a modern man transforms a colonial style people.

More great storytelling by the author, some new (but necessary) characters -- all as fleshed out as one could ask for. I was really pleased and surprised at the length of the book -- NOT a finish-it-in-two-evenings short story. It took the better part of a week, reading several hours a night to get to the conclusion -- and I still wanted more.
The main characters continued to play major parts and were not abandoned as some authors do.
Many times I found myself laughing out loud at the antics between Yozef and his bodyguards and friends. I cried when Ana said Yozef was "in the arms of God" (no spoiler). When a book can make that much of an emotional impact, someone is doing some high-level storytelling.
The book ended at a logical stopping point -- now may be time for some spinoff books in this wonderful new world's setting.
There were some minor editing errors, puntuation, hyphenation, and mismatched tences in the same sentence. There were a couple of places where the sentence had an unnecessary word that should be omitted, and a few sentences that didn't make sense because of words flip-flopped around. (I reported all these errors to the store). But the editing was far superior compared to most of the KU books out there.
All-in-all a wonderfully gripping storyline with a great cast of characters. Buy it, rent it with KU, but read this series.
Much better overall than Webber's Safehold series from book three onward. This author didn't drag out the story unnecessarily just to milk the fans for more cash.
Thank you.

Not quite as good as the previous books. I didn't like the huge change from introducing new things to the island (and seeing the results) to the huge focus on military tactics. I found a lot of the tactical planning to be boring, especially as it starts to repeat and becomes very repetitive with the same information being told to the reader several times (especially the geography stuff, dear god). The military action itself was good, there was just too much buildup and preparation. If even just some of the traveling around and discussing terrain segments had been cut, I'd be giving this five stars.

It was pretty satisfying seeing a lot of the smaller sub-plots that had been ongoing from the last couple books get wrapped up, and I was overall happy with the ending.

A minor complaint though: Yosef's "it comes to me" phrasing quickly became obnoxious. At least in the previous books it made sense in the way he's speaking, like as a response to a question asking how he came up with something. Here, it's just thrown into the middle of sentences and feels really out of place. It also gains an irritating sort of condescending tone every time he says it.

This book is a very disappointing entry into this series. You could almost skip the first 40% or so of the book and not miss too much. It takes almost half way into the book before you will see anything new or interesting, and then it isn't until about the 70% mark that things develop any type of tension.
Topping it all off is the way the entire story is wrapped up in about 3 chapters. Given the build-up thus far, I was left a little disappointed

I liked the previous books and this book had it's good parts but it seems like as Yozef gets promoted the meat of the "action" is the leaders of the two sides reading messages on how everything progreses. The fighting & experimenting of the previous books is gone and has been replaced with Yozef sitting in a chair reading reports about experiments and fighting. I've given other books in this series 5 stars but this one gets 1 from me. Maybe as I try to grind through the last quarter of the book I'll come back and add a star or two but right now at 73% this story has nothing going for it. The author has a talent for telling certain types of stories, but turning Generals and Leaders into an interesting HQ scene isn't one of them.

I am not the type to knitpick something to death or one that has to speak conversely to popular opinion. My honest feeling regarding the entire series is recognition of a very good author. He managed to make mediocre interesting enough I finished all four books. It was close, I almost stopped at three but I am glad I didn't, I am happier knowing the final thoughts of Yosef Kolsco.
My disappointment is strong however. So much so it esclipsed by review of these works. An author skilled enough to have all my attention and excited page turning slowly dim until the desire was close to nonexistent all due to lack of plot, lack of story and most egregious lack of imagination. If he is so good, good enough to compell the turning of pages even after the desire is gone all for the hope the end would equal the beginning I wonder; what a great series this could have been. C'est la vie.

I read a LOT. In my sixty-five years of reading sci-fi I guess I've read the best and some of the not so much best. I start many series only to give up after a couple of books. I don't know if it's the plethora of available material because of the self publishing phenomena but there sure is a lot to choose from. I am absolutely thrilled I came across the Forged series. The biggest disappointment was realizing that once I'd finished book four that there wasn't any more. I am hopeful that the future brings more, and the author certainly left himself enough room to keep going. Great premise, great characters, great pacing. I can't find enough praise (or stars) to express my pleasure at finding this series.

You must seriously suspend your understanding of how real people actually think, act, and behave to enjoy this series. After the fourth installment, it’s become a bit of a tiresome chore for me.

I do believe the story is somewhat imaginative story (somewhat being that a transplanted uptimer is an oft-used plot device) that somehow does just enough to keep me interested in how it all goes down although the fact that good guys win is a given. But the author falls into a number of amateurish writing traps.

He overvalues his characters and he overpowers them. With surprisingly few exceptions, the people of the island old Joe washed up on are surprising liberal, even for today’s standards despite being from a tribal, patriarchal society hundreds of years more primitive than our own. The author has basically made them an idealized version of our own society, which is of course completely unrealistic and doesn’t even fit the own narrative he framed. Next all his characters are special with no flaws I’ve ever perceived. The tried and true one-dimensionals abound in these novels. Joe has all these special alien powers. Thank goodness this twenty-something science geek also seriously dabbled in military theory and just about everything else you can imagine, how convenient. Absurd actually. Oh he even knows details of geology I only learned in a graduate environmental archaeology class, despite 10 hours of undergrad geology. Sure...

The next amateurish technique is over-explaining. He hashes everything out with verbal dialogue or internal monologue to an endless degree, then he does it again with different characters for the same topics. It wasn’t bad in the first book but each book gets needlessly longer. The third book has least plot movement yet is still 2nd longest. This book trumps them all for no reason. Spoon-feeding is for children, Olaf. I’m a grown man.

My biggest specific complaint is how old Joe’s loyal wife had to talk HIM into having a second wife despite that it is not a common custom in their society though not explicitly forbidden. She does this because she needs a babysitter, no joke, and her friend is also depressed... I wanted to believe that maybe the author spent dozens of pages hashing this out then endlessly updating the reader about it because it somehow played into the main plot, but I suspected this was juvenile fantasy expressed in words. I’ll let you guess which one it turned to be. I really question whoever edits these books or advises the author. This entire polygamy sideplot is a complete waste of time and a harmful distraction ultimately.

This is dime-novel quality pulp fiction in a digital age. Thankfully we don’t have to pay hardback prices anymore and I can justify spending a few dollars on blah like this.

Kindle Unlimited -Thank you.
Really happy this showed up as a true Kindle Unlimited series so I'd get to read it!

I'm with the reviewer(s) that enjoyed the 'slice of life' storylines as much, if not more, than the incredibly well done war themes. Kind of petty, but was glad Ana's immediate kinfolk didn't appear to have been invited to the ending ceremony. So... I'd like to get to read about the university creation, exchanges with allies, family growth, a deepening of the relationship with Ana, and mayhem from the children.

The 4th book would end the series nicely. But I'm hoping the future possibilities references might mean that this is the close of an arc and that the series will continue.

I was hooked on this story line from the first book and this final book of the series kept me to the end. The characters were well-drawn and more diverse than often seen in sci-fi\fantasy. The plot was mostly predictable but with enough twists to keep me reading until late at night. Just a few criticisms that by no means should deter someone from enjoying the books: I felt the rapid adoption of Yosef’s 21st century ideas by a relatively backward tribal society strained credulity at times. I also felt that the Narthani were far too competent and organized for a supposedly 18th century military. At that point in history, armies were still led by the nobility, however incompetent, with no general staff and limited organization. Major blunders and internal bickering were endemic in every army of the time. The Narthani military in this book operated more like the well-oiled German Army in World War II. This made them formidable but less consistent with the other aspects of the world Thorenson created. I also wondered at the complete absence of any discussion of the printing press and it’s profound impact on society. Several references to having books “copied” suggested this society did not have the printing press. Yet the level of other technology and organization as depicted in the story would be impossible without such a fundamental technology.

These are relatively small points. I am glad Thorenson planted several mysteries in the books regarding the Watchers and earlier aliens which will require a further series to develop. I look forward to reading them!

This was a nail biter. So much detail, it almost became muddled at times. So many people to keep track of is difficult. Overall the story was a great continuation and very well written. I did not want to stop reading. I will be looking forward to the next book in this very interesting and informative series. It makes me wonder what I would do in Yosef's place.

Loved the entire series! Learned so much about strategy. The secondary characters were awesome also. I do wonder how was the news received in Narthor about the defeat? What about the Fuome's thoughts about the technological advancements? What happened to the enemy soldiers that were hiding in thw cleft of rocks. What happenes that was in the bed with Ederling? And Aunt Tyla? So many questions. Loved the whole series.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It has a great premise, well built world, and excellent plot execution.

One or two point have some slow day in the life moments but not enough to Serra t fringe overall experience.

I enjoyed a well-written series of books that didn’t include filthy language, and the sex scenes mostly left to the imagination.
Developing the scenes, and keeping tract of all the characters by the author, revealed his life experience in coordinating relationships, and strategic knowledge of war-fare.
Good job.

While I enjoyed the concept reading book 1 the rest of them have been something of a slog. Revisiting things from time to time has its place but this book could easily lose 25% or more in repetitive introspections and explanations. It took what could have been a 5star book down to 3 at best for me.

This series has only gotten better with each book. Character development has greatly progressed, and the plot developments seem to grow organically given the basic premise. It has gone well beyond what could have a rehash of the man who matters genre. I am looking forward to the next installnent.

I've finished the complete series...but barely. I love the premise of this story but instead of following the adventures of a young man who inadvertently ended up on a planet elsewhere in the universe and finding himself with humans circa 1700, we end up watching an ego out of control. The hero, on his way to being emperor of his planet, subjugates the population and has them loving him. He has men, women and children undertaking massive digging projects and sacrificing themselves to their enemy just to protect himself and his harem of wives from the enemy, His brave family continue to warn each other to stay away from the front lines. We're too important and if we were killed, who would invent toilet paper? I found myself pulling for the enemy. On the other hand, my vocabulary has improved. You can tell the author has lots of letters behind his name. I had to keep my dictionary handy to follow along. I've also developed a loathing for the word "however" and the phrase "for example". Probably won't ever say those words again. Good luck.

What I like most about this series is that there are enough storylines to keep the series alive for a long time to come, but not so many to be overwhelming. Fans of dystopian fiction will enjoy this series for its originality within the genre.

Some may find these books long, but they are as long as they need to be. I read these all under the the store prime lending library rubric, but if I hadn't had that I would have paid for every book in this series