Review Me Twice - Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

I think I've mentioned this week that I read this book when I was a kid.  And you get a very different perception of it as a kid (IE. There's a puppy.  And you want Marty to keep the puppy.)

As an adult, I realize the reasons this won a Newbery Award.  It manages to teach kids good lessons without being overly condescending.  Marty is a fleshed out, real kid with all sorts of idiosyncrasies.  He's CONSTANTLY rationalizing stuff to himself to make himself feel less guilty.  He also problem solves his way out of his problems.

There's a lot of stuff that's some tough material for kids.  There's blackmail in this book and the entire book is, basically, about Marty wanting to keep a dog that's being beaten.  There's poverty and this sense of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the community, everyone turning a blind eye if it doesn't have to do with them.

I like that, while the ending is happy, it's not unrealistic.  Judd is still kind of really a jerk.  However, we start to see that, maybe, he's not a jerk all the time.  Maybe he might actually be an ok guy sometimes.

It's a really great book for kids and doesn't treat them like delicate flowers (which I'm always in favor of.)

My Bottom Line 4 out of 5

I avoided this book for a long time. I was never asked to read it in school, I skirted around it when it was on lists like the library's Summer Reading Program or the Accelerated Reader options, and I never received it as a gift as a child. Why? There's a kid and a dog on the cover, and that usually means sadness. And as much as I love a sad story, I don't when it involves an animal. I'm one of those people who loves my cat more than I love most people.

But it wasn't that bad. It is a children's book, after all; the animal abuse is discussed, not described.

Beyond that, I like Marty. Not in the sense that I would be friends with him in real life, but that he's a well-fleshed-out character. And the setting is great, too. I don't live in the country myself, but I have close ties to it, and there is one paragraph early in the book that describes southern culture perfectly: Marty's dad has to talk to Judd (Shiloh's owner) about the dog, but in the south, you don't just drive up and start talking about what you're there to talk about. You have to discuss the weather, the price of cattle, your families, whatever, for 10 minutes, and then you can broach the topic at hand. I've seen this in practice all my life, and Naylor perfectly summarized it.

I didn't love the book and I have no nostalgic attachment to it, but it wasn't bad.

Newbery Award

This week's review book, Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, is a Newbery Award winner, so I'm going to tell you what exactly that means.

The Newbery Medal was started in 1921, and was the first children's book award in the world. The medal is above on the left. In 1971, the Newbery Honor (on the right) was instituted, to be given to runners-up.

The award was named for John Newbery, who published children's books in the 18th century. (The reason that was a huge deal is a topic for another day, but suffice it to say that children's literature didn't get the respect it deserves back then.)

The Newbery is awarded to the author of "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children" each year by the American Library Association's Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC). The Newbery and the Caldecott are the two most prestigious awards for children's literature, and are widely celebrated yearly when announced at the ALA Midwinter meeting.

In its first year, the Newbery was awarded to six books. It has been given to anywhere between one and eight books every year since.

There is an equivalent British award called the Carnegie Medal, pictured on the right (and two authors have won both a Newbery and a Carnegie: Sharon Creech and Neil Gaiman). There is an equivalent German award too, called the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis, on the left (and two authors have won a Newbery and a DJ: Scott O'Dell and Jean Craighead George).