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!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A Book for New Agers!
Comment: I was shocked to find that the author changed the names and sexes of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It was nice fiction but found it blasphemous and also misleading.
Customer Rating: Summary: The Shack
Comment: I read, completley,this much talked about book but I did not care for it. I'm an 84 year old Christian--evangelical--but this was not for me. Maybe younger folks see something here that I do not understand. I just can't view the Trinity in this way.
Customer Rating: Summary: A must read
Comment: This is the best book about the nature of God I have ever read. I gave a copy to each of my children and have two that are circulating among friends. It was money well spent.
Customer Rating: Summary: An atheist writes...
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Shack
Comment: 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.
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