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.

Mrs. Naylor is the author of over 60 books, including Alice in Rapture, Sort Of; Reluctantly Alice; Beetles, Lightly Toasted, One of the Third Grade Thonkers, and Bernie and the Bessledorf Ghost. She and her husband, Rex, live in Bethesda, Maryland, and have two grown sons, Jeff and Michael.