After finding an abused beagle owned by his brutal neighbor Judd Travers, Marty defies his society's standards of not meddling with each other's business.

[5] When she wrote and published Shiloh, her 65th novel,[6] she was living in Bethesda, Maryland with her husband Rex,[3] a speech pathologist whom she married in May 1960.

[1] The novel has been translated into at least 10 languages: Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Swedish.

[11] The novel is set in the small town of Friendly, West Virginia,[nb 1] where an eleven-year-old boy named Marty Preston finds a stray beagle wandering in the hills near his house.

Its tail was wagging hopefully, but every time I put out my hand to touch it, the dog trembled and shook, and crawled away on its belly as though I were about to do it bodily harm.

[17][nb 3] [I]t is a deceptively simple story about good and evil, truth and honesty and the various dimensions between, presented in the colorful setting of the West Virginia mountains.

[21] Jane Langton of The New York Times Book Review stated that the novel was written in a "comfortable, down-home style".

Writing that the main story in Shiloh is Marty's struggle in his mind with morality, Langston noted that it is "presented simply, in a way any third- or fourth-grade reader can understand".

[22] Scholar Kathie Cerra praised the novel for its "vivid sensory detail", which enables readers to experience Marty's "inner life of thought and feeling".

In Marty's "teem[ing] with life" first-person narrative, he shows how he feels when he tells lies to his parents and when he embraces the wriggling Shiloh.

[26] Scholars Alethea Helbig and Agnes Perkins wrote that the "Appalachian setting is well evoked, in both its beauty and its code of ethics that Marty must defy to save the dog".

[34] Author Timothy Morris wrote that the plot and themes in Shiloh had many parallels to the 1940 novel Lassie Come-Home by Eric Knight.

[37] In Shiloh, Naylor does not impart an explicit meaning of "honesty" to her juvenile readers, journalist Nancy Gilson observed.

Be one hundred percent honest and carry that dog back to Judd so that one of your creatures can be kicked and starved all over again, or keep him here and fatten him up to glorify your creation?

Despite his fears, Marty continues walking to Judd's house, persistent on protecting Shiloh despite potential bodily harm and even death to himself.

After Marty takes a forbidden bite from his sister Dara Lynn's chocolate Easter rabbit and refuses to own up, his mother is disappointed.

She called the book a "heartstopping, but tough-as-steel story of a boy and an abused dog in the hardscrabble hill country of West Virginia".

[40] Equating Shiloh to classics like Charlotte's Web, author Laura Elliott praised the novel's "voice, suspense, and layer of themes".

[22] The Sacramento Bee's Judy Green disagreed, believing that Shiloh was "worthy of its award, which labels it the best fiction for children written last year".

[49] The Booklist's Ellen Mandel extolled the novel for its "moving and powerful look" at the virtues and vices of human nature and the murky moral choices in conflicts of everyday life.

[28] In her favorable review of Shiloh, Betsy Hearne of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books wrote that "readers will be absorbed by the suspenseful plot, which will leave them with some memorable characterizations as well as several intriguing ethical questions".

[1] Calling it "unusually warm and moving", Heather Vogel Frederick of The Christian Science Monitor praised the novel for being an "excellent choice as a family read-aloud".

The author replied in an interview with The Virginian-Pilot that some people in the world "speak crudely" and "you can't put your child in a glass bubble and protect him always".

[57] Ohio State University Professor Rudine Sims Bishop, a member of the 1992 Newbery committee, said in an interview that Shiloh was a "sleeper" that surfaced as a serious contender deep in their debate.

[19] After the January 27 announcement of Shiloh's winning the Newbery Medal, Naylor was flooded with numerous phone calls, requests for interviews, and mail.

[60] On April 14, at the annual conference of the Missouri Association of School Librarians, Shiloh received that year's Mark Twain Readers Award.

[74][nb 7] The first of Naylor's more than 100 juvenile and adult works to be adapted into a film,[76] it starred Blake Heron as Marty and Scott Wilson as Judd Travers.

Judd is transformed from a native in the novel into an interloper in the film who holds the contrarian view that humans and animals are different,[79] that "[a]nimals were put here for us.

Ranking Shiloh as one of his top 10 selections,[80] Roger Ebert praised the film for being a "remarkably mature and complex story about a boy who loves a dog and cannot bear to see it mistreated", depicting "the real world with all of its terrors and responsibilities".

[83] Author John Wynne praised MacNicol's delivery, writing that he "does character voices well—both male and female—and creates a folksy atmosphere appropriate to the material".