First things first this isn’t a review, I just felt the need to share my experience with this amazing book. For some background, Shadow of the Wolf is a dark supernatural take on the Robin Hood story, and as a massive fan of Robin Hood, I absolutely loved it.
So let’s set the scene this story started back in like 2015ish when I first read the book. I loved it and was even more excited about the fact that on the inside cover it says Shadow of the Wolf is 1st book in a planned trilogy. I love trilogies! Now, after I read it that first time I semi-forgot the future sequels because I got busy with college and such and didn’t read as much. Then 2 to 2 and a half years ago I got a hankering to reread the book(which I did of course) and then remembered there should be more! So, as any good reader, I look up online to see if I can get the 2nd book anywhere only to find out the only thing I that the internet knows is that it’s supposed to be called Winters Teeth.
Now you might be wondering what did you do next? Obviously, I tried to find the author(Tim Hall) on social media and do a bit of cyberstalking to see if they were mentioning how writing, editing, etc. was doing. If you’re smart you can guess what I’m about to say and that is that I could not for the life of me find the author on anything but Goodreads. It got to the point where I wouldn’t be surprised if I learned that Tim Hall was a pseudonym and the man on the book was some type of author stand in. After that failure, I did the most logical step I could think of. Sending an email to the publisher through the contact us link on their website asking if the rest of the trilogy is still going to be a thing. Twice I might add. Although I blame that failure on the fact that they were in a different time zone than me and really I never thought anything would actually come out of that. You might now be wondering what did you do next? If you guessed “tried tweeting the publisher” then you’d be correct! Congrats. And sadly once again no answer.
After all those failures of trying to find answers, I started to just assume that the author had writer’s block and was maybe writing a new book to clear their mind. And a few months later I try once again to see if there was any new info and lo and behold I find a post on Tim Hall’s Goodreads profile saying just that. He had writer’s block and his publisher suggested he try writing another book and that it worked and he was back to writing Winter’s Teeth. I bet you can imagine my joy and after that I kinda moved on expecting it to come out soonish, only for nothing to happen.
Now, I can’t remember if it was around half a year or a full year after that that I try to find that Goodreads post just to see if there’s been an update. And for the life of me, I could not find it again. I have no idea why I couldn’t find it but it got to the point where I was wondering if I dreamed it up. But then I want to say around this time last year a miracle happened. And no before you think it the sequel still doesn’t exist. That sad little miracle is that I found the post again(which was published in 2019 might I add)! So, at least I now know that my mind didn’t make it up.
Now, after all of this, you might be wondering what are you doing now? Nothing really, I just occasionally check Goodreads every couple of weeks to see if anything new has popped up. And of course, I’m writing this blog post in the wild hope that maybe someone at David Fickling Books or even Tim Hall himself sees it and can finally give me an answer of if the rest of Sherwood’s Doom is still in development.
That’s all I want to know truly, is it still happening. Because if so, I will wait till the end of time on the edge of my seat for this series as long as I know the plan is to still do it. But if it’s not happening anymore I would love to know so that I can move on and mourn the loss of a great series. Or at least create a satisfying head-cannon ending for myself.
Nerd Thoughts 