Book Review: The Shack by Wm. Paul Young

I have been wanting to read this book for some time now. I know many of you have heard of this novel as it has been exposed on the media like crazy about a year or so ago. It has sold millions of copies and become quite popular. This is not a YA novel, but at the same time I would imagine many young adults have probably read this novel. There is nothing about the book that is inappropriate for the YA audience. After having this book on my Wishlist on Paperbackswap.com it finally was available, I requested it, and just recently knocked it off my TBR pile.

With all the hoopla surrounding this book from when it came out in 2007, I was really excited to read the novel. I did not know much about it actually except for the basic premise of (from Amazon website)

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!

I will be honest and let you know that for some reason this novel did not grab me the way I thought it would. I just did not get into the storyline much. I posted on my Twitter Bookclub account and a few other places whether or not I should keep reading the book after I was about 50 pages into it and people told me yes so I did. I did read quickly towards the end because I wanted to be done. I think the message was a good one and the novel had some very interesting points about how we behave as humans, how we interact, and how quick we are to judge and really our judgments have very little merit or credit. This book deals with religion, God, and how we interact and view the world through religion, but at the same time it was not trying to persuade the reader to become Christian. I don't know if it was just the fact I was not in the mood for a religious type novel or what, but I found it to be a boring read. I thought that maybe I was just not into a soul searching type book, but I just started reading Eat, Love, Pray, and so far I cannot stop reading this book and am really enjoying it for some strange reason.

Don't be deterred from reading this book based on my opinions. Go to Amazon.com and you will the novel has over 4,000 reviews and 2700 are 5 star ratings. It just did not do it for me. You have those novels that just don't stick and this was one of them. It has been a long time since I was disappointed in a read, but there you have it. I did mark some quotes that I really liked and plan on using them in the future so there was some positive. Be sure to check out the website and if you have any thoughts you would like to share about the novel, go right ahead because I would like to hear what your opinions were/are on the book.