Review – The Shack

Mack, short for Mackenzie Allen Phillips, was an ordinary man in his mid-fifties, about to have an extraordinary experience with God. He was married to Nan, a woman he’d grown to love more with each passing year. In particular, he liked how Nan referred to God as “Papa,” and he knew she shared a deep intimacy with Him to be on such personal terms. Although Mack knew God, he wasn’t that familiar with Him, but would like to be.

The Phillips shared five children and loved each one the best. From Jon, recently married, and Tyler, working on his master’s degree and living on campus, to Josh and Kate, who lived at home and attended a local community college, to adorable Missy. Missy came late into their family as an unexpected delight, and at six years old, she stole everyone’s heart. Her engaging smile and effervescent personality lightened the darkest of days. Nan’s nightly prayers with Missy had birthed an innocence and closeness with Jesus in her young child, which was very similar to her own experience.

Late one fall, Mack planned to take Josh, Kate and Missy camping to Oregon’s Wallowa Lake State Park. The recreation area was primitive and known to those who lived there as the gateway to Eagle Cap Wilderness and Hell’s Canyon. Their family frequently vacationed there-Nan was scheduled to teach that weekend, and their two older sons were at school. Mack felt that as a middle-aged dad, he could surely manage three kids by himself.

Normally he could-but, not this time. Two of his children would be threatened and one would be abducted and brutally murdered before the weekend ended. He couldn’t know that the weekend would birth what he would come to call The Great Sadness that would forever change his life and his view of God-until four years later, when “Papa” left him a note in his mailbox, inviting him to The Shack where it all began. An invitation that would challenge his beliefs, astound his senses, and transform him in ways he couldn’t imagine.

Written with exquisite emotional detail, the chapters end with such excitement and intrigue the pages-and time- slip by without notice. Don’t start this compelling book until you have time to finish it.

Author William (Willie) P. Young, was born in Canada, but currently resides in Oregon. As a child, his missionary parents raised him among stone-age tribes in the highlands of New Guinea, their mission field. Young suffered severe losses as a child and young adult and now lives in what he calls the “wastefulness of grace,” with his family in the Pacific Northwest.

I believe Young’s rearing outside of our sophisticated culture was part of God’s design to unleash his imagination so he could pen this unusual work that I expect to become a classic. I believe Young met his Divine appointment when he wrote this debut novel as a mystery wrapped within a fable which has been compared to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress by Eugene Peterson, Professor Emeritus, Spiritual Theology, Regent College, Vancouver, B.C.

This poignant story of relationship and spiritual hunger will take you into another dimension and provide an alternative view of God. It has the potential to heal and change readers with its intimacy-spiritual daring-and literary integrity. The Shack will equip readers to comprehend God’s presence in a powerful new way.