Product Description Mackenzie Allen Philips' 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 judgment 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. In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant "The Shack" wrestles with the timeless question, "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?" The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him. You'll want everyone you know to read this book!
An atheist writes...September 7, 2008 2 out of 2 found this review helpful
As an atheist, I just want to say...wow. Is that the best you've got?
The blurb on the cover says "THE SHACK will leave you craving for the presence of God." Genuinely curious, and with an open mind, I started reading.
So you get four chapters of folksy family fun, culminating in what appears to be a shocking murder -- these scenes are rendered well enough, and I (the father of a young girl myself) felt the protagonist's anguish well enough to keep reading.
Then, abruptly and with a deafening grinding of gears, the book veers off into the weeds, where it remains firmly wedged for the balance of its page-count. Ponderous and inpenetrable, jargon-heavy and utterly lacking in anything resembling a narrative, it's sort of like a cross between a Thomas Kinkade painting and the second & third Matrix movies -- winsome and twee, but utterly tangled up in the minutiae of its own mythology, blundering blindly forward with its shoelaces tied together, firing platitudes and cod-philosophy around in the vain hopes that some of it might hit home. Whole pages, whole chapters go by, with the author staggering around in a kind of fog of theology, apparently trying to resolve age-old questions but instead writing things like "Guess that's jes' the way I is" and "Don't confuse adaptation for intention, or seduction for reality."
And so it wears on, chapter after chapter of clunky dialogue about ill-defined concepts which are picked up and dropped like the toys of a hyperactive child, apparently seeking to clarify but succeeding only in obscuring all meaning in a lavender cloud of unicorn farts. By about chapter 6 or 7, the Missy plot seems like a distant memory, and the reader's only concern is to get out of this book alive.
As a novel, then, this is a laughable effort, but I know it is not primarily intended to be a novel -- it is intended to be a recruiting tool, aimed at winning non-believers over into the theist camp with a sort of warm-n-cozy new-agey version of Christianity, in which the Holy Trinity are a kind of nonthreatening multicultural sitcom family, a trio of irascible kooks with hearts of gold, etc. etc. There may, I suppose, be some hypothetical atheists who are so close to rock bottom that they glimpse some sort of salvation or meaning in this book. But seriously, I doubt there could be more than a few dozen.
So go ahead and feel free to give this book to a 'lost'/'seeking'/'fallen' friend or family member. Make them part of your secret 'Missy Project' (as touted on Young's website), earn a few more bucks for the author and rack up some points with the man (sorry, woman, er, no, I mean women, or do I?...) upstairs. Just know that the lucky recipient will, the next time you see them, give you an amused (or bemused) look, and say something like "Um, yeah, thanks for the book and all," while backing slowly towards the door.
If this kind of arcane, ill-constructed, mush-mouthed tripe is what passes for serious Christian writing these days, I'm quite happy to leave you to it, dickering over the True Nature of the Trinity or the exact temperature of Hell -- instead I'll smilingly opt to brush off a copy of Middlemarch or Howards End, or maybe a spot of Vonnegut or Wodehouse, and get a bracing, swooningly beautiful dose of the real meaning of life.
Good day.
The ShackSeptember 7, 2008 I purchased the audiobook of a book that I had read and enjoyed. I like listening to audiobooks and usually get more out of the story when I listen to it.
FICTION worth reading!September 7, 2008 Ya... this is too funny, but I thought this was based on a true story! I was almost too embarrassed to admit it, but I thought I might save someone else from getting the same impression if I just tell the truth. It's really a good book, well worth reading. It changed how I sometimes viewed God, and helped me to see Him as ALL Loving, even in my tough times. I think it's especially helpful to some people who have experienced a hard season, but I'm not sure everyone in that place would be ready for it. I would be cautious about passing it on to a hurting friend unless I felt they were ready to receive what it has to offer.
Recommended by a friendSeptember 7, 2008 0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book was recommended by a friend. Have not read it yet, however several people have said they have enjoyed it. Looking forward to reading it.
Don't waste your moneySeptember 6, 2008 2 out of 3 found this review helpful
The popularity of this book - and its 5 star rating - is yet another testament to the dumbing down of the American public. Don't waste your time or money - there are no insights here.
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