| "SHILOH"
Author: Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Interest Level: Middle Grades (4-8)
ATOS Reading Level: 4.4-4.9
AR Points: 4.0-6.0 each
Publisher Recommended Ages: 8-12
Publisher: Simon Schuster/Aladdin
Book Type: Paperback
Book Description:
When he finds a lost beagle in the hills behind his West Virginia home, Marty tries to hide it from his family and the dog's real owner, a mean-spirited man known to shoot deer out of season and to mistreat his dogs.
Book Reviews:
School Library Journal: "Naylor has again written a warm, appealing book." Grades 3-5.
Book Awards:
- USA: Newbery 1992 (Shiloh)
Book Guides:
About the Shiloh Trilogy:
Eleven-year-old Marty Preston loves to spend time up in the hills behind his home near Friendly, West Virginia. Sometimes he takes his .22 rifle to see what he can shoot, like some cans lined up on a rail fence. Other times he goes up early in the morning just to sit and watch the fox and deer. But one summer Sunday, Marty comes across something different on the road just past the old Shiloh schoolhouses—a young beagle—and the trouble begins.
What do you do when a dog you suspect is being mistreated runs away and comes to you? When it is someone else's dog? When the man who owns him has a gun? This is Marty's problem, and he finds it is one he has to face alone. When his solution gets too big for him to handle, things become more frightening still. Marty puts his courage on the line, and discovers in the process that it is not always easy to separate right from wrong.
Sometimes, however, you do almost anything to save a dog.
About the Author:
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor met the dog who is Shiloh in this story during a visit to West Virginia. "It was the saddest dog I ever saw," she says, and for weeks after returning home, she could not get it out of her mind. And so she did what she always does when a problem haunts her-works it out in a book. "Like a patchwork quilt," says Mrs. Naylor, "a novel is made up of things that have happened to me and things I have heard or read about, all mixed up with imaginings."
The real story has a happy ending, however. Friends in West Virginia wrote that they found the dog she had seen near the little community of Shiloh, took her in and named her Clover. |
