William P. Young: The Shack (2007, Windblown Media)
Paperback, 252 pages
English language
Published Sept. 11, 2007 by Windblown Media.
Mackenzie Allen Phillips' 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.
This book takes a great character and exposition, and drowns it in a very literal case of deus ex machina. What a letdown.
I'm generally not a fan of the overtly didactic storytelling style, and this is no exception. But this was recommended to me very strongly, and I didn't want to discourage the effort at sharing. At least I knew going in so I was prepared.
I basically had to just plow through this on lunch breaks. I didn't feel like dedicating any of my good evening reading time to it. The writing is clumsy, and the story is pretty much just a hook to hang an ideology on. I appreciated that it made an attempt at rejecting much of organized religion, although it was also very confused in how it accepted or included other world religions. In other words it was still very much coming from an Americanized Christian viewpoint.
There were a few scenes that were touching and heartfelt, so not all was bad, and that's why I gave it …
I'm generally not a fan of the overtly didactic storytelling style, and this is no exception. But this was recommended to me very strongly, and I didn't want to discourage the effort at sharing. At least I knew going in so I was prepared.
I basically had to just plow through this on lunch breaks. I didn't feel like dedicating any of my good evening reading time to it. The writing is clumsy, and the story is pretty much just a hook to hang an ideology on. I appreciated that it made an attempt at rejecting much of organized religion, although it was also very confused in how it accepted or included other world religions. In other words it was still very much coming from an Americanized Christian viewpoint.
There were a few scenes that were touching and heartfelt, so not all was bad, and that's why I gave it two stars and not just one, but you do have to dig through most of the book to find them hidden. I wouldn't recommend it just for those moments.
