1992: SHILOH by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
The day Shiloh come, we’re having us a big Sunday dinner.
If it’s not obvious by now, I love children’s literature, I love middle-grade books. Some of it comes from having a mom who was a librarian and a wife who is an English teacher, but I just love all of the variety that you can find in literature for this age group, all of the different genres and forms and deconstructions and ways to talk about serious things with a young audience. It is endlessly fascinating to me to see how children’s authors write great, engaging works that hold up decades later, that introduce children to different parts of American history, or complex emotions tied to loss and loneliness, or our responsibilities to each other in civil society, or how we think about our relationship to the divine. Some of them are deadly serious, some of them are hilarious. As I’ve worked through the list of Newbery medalists, I’ve obviously found some that I’ve liked more than others, but none of them have been boring. And part of the reason that this project isn’t boring is the sheer variety across everything I’ve been reading, across all sorts of genres, from historical fiction to ‘bummer lit’ to dual-voice poetry to animal quests to murder mysteries to high fantasy to urban legends to quiz bowl Cinderella stories. But, of course, there is a key genre, dating back to the very beginning of children’s literature, which we have not covered until today: Dog.
“Dog” is the genre in which “there is dog”. You have read Dog before, there are a lot of novels in Dog pitched specifically to this age group. Old Yeller is Dog. Sounder is Dog. Because Of Winn-Dixie is Dog. The Incredible Journey is Dog. Where The Red Fern Grows is Dog (technically I suppose it’s “Dogs”). And 1992 medalist Shiloh, by the absurdly prolific Phyllis Reynolds Naylor - Shiloh was her sixty-fifth novel and she would write dozens more after it - is Dog.
Dog is distinct from Horse, a different genre which we have also covered in the past. Horse is more high-class: Horse is about history, about a window into the lives of the rich and powerful. Dog is the animal-genre of the people. Dog is about poor or working-class people who find meaning and hope in Dog, only to have the title dog suffer Dog-hardship and likely Dog-death. Dog is more immediate than Horse, and that is especially clear in Shiloh, written in first person present tense Appalachian dialect.
Look, I keep saying “Dog” as a bit, but you already know that I am actually describing a real genre. You already know the beats of this genre. It starts with a human protagonist, who is lonely and poor: in Shiloh, that is Marty Preston, an eleven-year-old living in Depression-era West Virginia. Marty’s life isn’t a parade of misery, but he’s definitely not living a life of comfort: his family sometimes struggles to put food on the table, and the medical bills for Marty’s grandmother keep piling up. Marty finds his younger sisters kind of annoying, and doesn’t have too many close human friends. He wants to grow up and become a veterinarian, but when his dad points out that going to vet school is expensive, “my dream sort of leaks out like water in a paper bag”.
But you know the next beat of Dog: Boy Meets Dog. A beagle wanders onto the Preston’s property and Marty immediately falls in love with him, although he also notices that the Beagle is really reluctant to be around people. It turns out the dog, which Marty names Shiloh, belongs to one of his neighbors, Judd Travers, who is an asshole that hunts out of season and hits his dogs. And the accompanying beat is Boy Loves Dog, as Marty and Shiloh immediately take to each other, as Shiloh is happy to finally have a safe home and Marty is happy to finally have a close and loyal friend. As he puts it with the kind of hyperbole you’d expect from an eleven-year-old boy, “If Jesus ever comes back to earth again, I’m thinking, he’ll come as a dog, because there isn’t anything as humble or patient or loving or loyal as the dog I have in my arms right now."
Which brings us to the next beat of Dog: Dog Gets Beat. The central conflict in the plot of Shiloh is Marty trying to figure out how to get Shiloh away from Judd Travers permanently, because Judd is beating up that dog. Naylor was inspired to write Shiloh after witnessing an act of animal cruelty herself; this is also what inspired O’Dell to write Island Of The Blue Dolphins, so I guess if you want to win a Newbery medal some day, you’re going to have to watch an animal get punched first. To some degree, Judd is a little bit cartoonish and the story can feel a little repetitive; Shiloh keeps running to the Preston home, Marty keeps secretly hiding him from Judd and from his own family, Judd keeps showing up to say words to the effect of “hey has anyone seen my dog I want to punch it”, Marty has to give the dog back and get scolded by his family. This happens a few times.
But Shiloh does eventually break out of this pattern and break the mold of Dog. Because you also all know the final beat of Dog: Dog Dies, and usually Dog Dies while saving the boy from something. But Shiloh doesn’t die, although I did guess that going in since Naylor has written three additional Shiloh novels.
Actually, what’s most striking about Shiloh is that there isn’t a climactic fight or disaster or accident where Shiloh can step in to sacrifice himself and save Marty’s life. Marty works for Judd for two weeks, doing odd jobs to earn enough money to buy Shiloh off of him. As he puts it, literally naming the literary genre in which he resides, “you make a deal with Judd Travers and you’re only eleven years old, you take what you can get. But all I’m thinking is dog.” That’s how things resolve, with two weeks of chopping wood and cleaning porches. It’s not exactly action-packed, but it’s different, and it’s different for a few reasons.
Marty’s story is more complex than “Boy Wants Dog”; it is a knot of complicated moral decisions, because for most of the novel, Marty is essentially trying to steal a dog from his neighbor and hide that theft from his family, but justify it all by believing that the dog will be safer with him than with Judd. More importantly, Marty knows this is a moral mess and struggles to find a way through it; as he says near the halfway point of the novel:
“I’m at the point where I’ll do most anything for Shiloh. A lie don’t seem a lie anymore when it’s meant to save a dog, and right and wrong’s all mixed up in my head.”.
So, first, Marty has to mentally get past the default “stay out of everyone else’s business” setting in his town. To care about whether his neighbor is beating up his dogs at all is unusual for him and everyone he knows:
"Around here it’s serious business when you got a quarrel with your neighbor and you got to carry it as far as the law. Folks ain’t that fond of Judd, and most of ’em likes my dad, but when it comes to taking a man’s property, I figure they’ll side with Judd."
And it’s even more unusual for Marty to start talking back to Judd and demanding that he do a better job taking care of Shiloh, which he starts doing as the novel goes on and his courage and fierce love for Shiloh grow:
"Way we’re raised around here, children don’t talk back to grown folks. Don’t hardly talk much at all, in fact. Learn to listen, keep your mouth shut, let the grown folks do the talking."
What Marty's decisions ultimately come down to is that he can't bear to see Shiloh suffer any more. He and his dad argue at one point in the novel over what "what's right" is in this situation:
"Dad’s voice is sharp: “You think Judd Travers is the only one around here hard-hearted toward his animals? You think he’s the only one who starves ’em or kicks ’em or worse? Open up your eyes, Marty. Open your eyes!” Now Dad half turns in his seat, back resting against the door, facing me: “How many times have you walked to the school bus and seen a chained-up dog in somebody’s yard? How many times you ever put your mind to whether or not it’s happy, its ribs sticking out like handles on the sides? Suddenly you’re face-to-face with a dog that pulls at your heart, and you all at once want to change things.” I swallow. “There’s got to be a first time,” I answer. Dad sighs. “You’re right about that,” he says."
There's got to be a first time, and Marty figures that now is as good a time as any to stand up for something.
But again, there's not really a big fight or climactic showdown where Marty throws himself into peril and rescues Shiloh directly. No, Marty ends up with Shiloh because he bothered to learn a little bit more about why Judd was the way he was. Judd's dad beat Judd up as a child, too; as Judd puts it, "Far back as I can remember, Pa took the belt to me— big old welts on my back so raw I could hardly pull my shirt on." It’s not a good excuse for hitting a dog, but Naylor doesn’t present it as such. When Marty hears this, he pities Judd, and though he started the novel angry at Judd for what he was doing to his dogs, he ends up feeling bad for him. The odd jobs he works for two weeks at Judd’s place aren’t just an obligation, they’re a bare minimum attempt to make an angry lonely guy feel a little less bad for a few hours. And nobody else does that for Judd, so when the two weeks of Marty’s work are over, Judd doesn’t try to screw him over by going back on their agreement, even though he threatened to do so several times. He just had someone else who was willing to be there for a little bit, and that was something he hadn’t had before.
As the novel ends, Marty muses in the final lines:
“I look at the dark closing in, sky getting more and more purple, and I’m thinking how nothing is as simple as you guess—not right or wrong, not Judd Travers, not even me or this dog I got here. But the good part is I saved Shiloh and opened my eyes some. Now that ain’t bad for eleven."
Dog is not my favorite literary genre; it’s formulaic and there’s often more misery and animal abuse than I’d prefer in my children’s books. But Shiloh is a thoughtful introduction for young readers to tough moral questions and the value of empathy and compassion. It ain’t bad for Dog.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1973 medalist, Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George.