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!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From AudioFile
Mac is a grief-stricken father in mid-life about to have an extraordinary experience with God. His great sadness began four years ago on a weekend camping trip, when his 6-year-old daughter, Missy, was murdered. What he couldn't know then, but is about to learn, was God's purpose for Missy's death. Roger Mueller's clear, gentle voice characterizes Mac's family with high-spirited joy and laughter. His portrayal of Missy's animated excitement makes her especially believable. His polished performance of grief-stricken Mac brings tears. With empathy and sensitivity, Mueller captures the mysterious voices of those who have invited him to the now abandoned, yet transformed, cabin in the wilderness. This compelling fantasy explores themes of love, loss, and blame. G.D.W. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
"The Shack" is a one of a kind invitation to journey to the very heart of God. Through my tears and cheers, I have been indeed transformed by the tender mercy with which William Paul Young opened the veil that too often separated me from God and from myself. With every page, the complicated do's and don't that distort a relationship into a religion were washed away as I understood Father, Son and Holy Spirit for the first time in my life. --Patrick M. Roddy, ABC News Emmy Award winning producer

Finally! A guy-meets-God Novel that has literary integrity and spiritual daring. "The Shack" cuts through the cliches of both religion and bad writing to reveal something compelling and beautiful about life's integral dance with the Divine. This story reads like a prayer--like the best kind of prayer, filled with sweat and wonder and transparency and surprise. When I read it, I felt like I was fellowshipping with God. If you read one work of fiction this year, let this be it. --Mike Morrell, zoecarnate.com

When the imagination of a writer and the passion of a theologian cross-fertilize the result is a novel on the order of "The Shack." This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" did for his. It's that good! --Eugene Peterson, Professor Emeritus of Spiritual Theology, Regent College, Vancouver, B.C.

About the Author
William P. Young was born a Canadian and raised among a stone-age tribe by his missionary parents in the highlands of what was New Guinea. He suffered great loss as a child and young adult, and now enjoys the 'wastefulness of grace' with his family in the Pacific Northwest.

Customer Reviews

The Shame of the Shack
The author builds his own pulpit and holds forth from it upon creation. He succeeds in reducing all of human history into an overnight stay with an "Aunt Jemimah" figure, a Hebrew from the House of Judah, and a collection of colored lights in a cabin in the woods.
Tragedy does not confront eternity as claimed on the book cover. What is accomplished is a poorly written imaginary description of one man's misery confronting that same man's faith. These concepts have been explored before and will be again by men and women who are better writers. Thank God.

A "Disney" version of God
I'm not a church-ey Christian, and I thought this book would be a good fit for me. Instead, I found it to be a "Disney" version of God and Christianity: easy to swallow, "feel-good", and universally un-offensive. It is not necessarily the hard-core truth about God and I even found it a little "new-agey". I have to agree that it in not accurate or sound doctrine. If you want real, scriptural answers to the tough questions this book proposes to answer, I'd suggest reading CS Lewis.

Where's the miracle?
There is a lot of hype surrounding William Paul Young's "The Shack" and the marketing behind it is very good considering that I read it (I'm not too into Christina literature). The Shack is about a man, Mack, whose daughter is kidnapped and murdered. He loses his faith and God sends him a note asking him to meet him at the shack where his daughter was murdered.

I don't want to ruin the book for others...but there really isn't a mystery in this novel. There is anticipation that there is some great miracle that will happen at the "shack." There isn't one. All there is is a discussion between Mack and God. I wish that that byline just said that. I'd still have read it. Instead I feel like I was duped into reading this book, expecting to find a miracle...

To say the least, there is little character development and the plot is thin. In order to really get your message across, you need the reader to care about the characters in the book and there was so little of the "Mack" character that I didn't care what happened to him.

This is a great book for the Christian community to read. I think it would open up a lot of discussion surrounding people's belief systems. However, if you are looking for a book with some meat in it...this isn't it.