The Shack by William P. Young, a book review.

The back of the book:
(They do a much better job in summarizing than I would).Mackenzie Allen Phillip’s youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later, in the midst of his Great sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgement he arrives at The Shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever.
My review in short:
Read it. Good book.
My review with a bit more detail:
I am not going to lie to you, this book was a little hard to swallow (even hard to read at times), and I am sitting here trying to think of how I can explain this without turning you off from the book. In order to do that, I will give a few more details about the book but will leave out any vital details. When Mack makes it to the shack, he finds himself with God, literally. He is not the god he expected to see, and certainly not the one I would ever expect either. Again, I’m being honest here, I struggled through the book for this very reason so I am telling you, get past it- listen to WHAT is said, and try not to let the big black lady throw you. God is who He is, He is the I Am; if he were trying to reach you or me, he would choose to put himself in the best form to do just that.
Another reason I struggled with this book is its basis of fact. The preface clearly states that Mack swears by the truth of the story. So that begs the question, do I believe it? Well, I want to. I do believe that God still reaches people in ways that are beyond us. Also, I don’t want to be putting God in a box by saying that He couldn’t have done all this exactly as Mack said that it was done. Truth is, God is above time and space and all things physical so, yes, I want to believe it.
So far all of this seems like I was put off by the book but on the contrary, these are some of the reasons I LIKE the book. Christians, or anybody for that matter, don’t need another book that we can passively read about God and let it go in one ear and then out the other. This book will stick to you for awhile, you will have to chew over parts of it, and you will most likely find it difficult to swallow. If you are a church go-er like me, you “know all about God” too. This book takes all of those little bits and pieces that you know about God and puts them together in a larger picture. As soon as you see that big picture, God may not be the god you thought he was. On that note, I challenge you to fact check what you find in The Shack with the Bible, which IS truth.
I think that there are so many lessons to be learned from The Shack, and the lessons you learn may not be the same as the ones I did. Some of the lessons that are still fresh in my mind are the consequences of free will and choices, why God “lets” bad things happen, and the fact that you don’t need a lake house to have a real, tangible relationship with Him (although I would LOVE to walk on the water with Jesus).
Read it. Then tell me what you thought. Hang in there with the big black lady; He has some great things to say. Don’t be lazy, read the preface and after words. Maybe before you read it, think about what form you think that God would choose to appear to you in. If you know anything about God and how he does things, I would guess that he would appear to me in a way that I would least expect it.