Shiloh
by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Summary
Eleven year old Marty Preston finds a mistreated beagle in the hills near his home in Friendly, West Virginia, and quickly figures out the dog belongs to Judd Travers, a neighbor known locally for how badly he treats his hunting dogs. Marty names the dog Shiloh, returns him once out of a sense of duty, and then hides him in the woods when Shiloh runs straight back rather than face going home. The secret falls apart after a German shepherd attacks Shiloh and Marty's family finds out what he has been doing, putting real pressure on Marty to give the dog back to a man everyone agrees mistreats him but nobody in Marty's poor, cautious family wants to openly cross.
Before returning Shiloh, Marty witnesses Judd shooting a deer out of season, evidence he uses to strike a deal: he will work off forty dollars, twenty hours of labor for Judd, to buy the dog outright. Judd tries to back out, claiming the agreement holds no real weight, but Marty keeps showing up and doing the work anyway, and something in that stubborn honesty changes how Judd sees him over the following days. Judd ultimately lets Marty keep Shiloh, and the book closes on Marty's own plain reflection that he saved Shiloh and opened his eyes some, a modest note for a modest, tightly told story.
Naylor writes in first person West Virginia dialect and keeps the book short and morally direct, closer to a fable about earning something the hard way than to an adventure story. Some critics, including the New York Times's Jane Langton, argued after the win that it was a good book rather than a great one, an honest disagreement readers still have.
Historical Context & Significance
Shiloh won the 1992 Newbery Medal, with Avi's Nothing but the Truth and Russell Freedman's The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane as that year's honor books. Atheneum published the one hundred forty four page novel on September 30, 1991; it went on to win the 1994 Sequoyah Children's Book Award, Mark Twain Readers Award, and William Allen White Children's Book Award.
Critics were largely warm at the time: Entertainment Weekly's Michele Landsberg called it strongly persuasive and told without a hint of moralizing, and Booklist's Ellen Mandel praised its moving and powerful look at human nature. Some West Virginia readers objected to its dialect, and its mild profanity drew occasional complaint. Naylor extended the story with Shiloh Season, Saving Shiloh and, much later, A Shiloh Christmas, deliberately giving Judd Travers more depth after noticing how flatly some young readers hated him, and a 1996 film adaptation directed by Dale Rosenbloom became a modest video hit despite an underwhelming theatrical run.