The Shack

written by William P. Young

My niece Melissa passed this book along to me. Generally I avoid the genre of "Christian fiction" because to me, books in this category too often feel too tidy, too scrubbed-clean. But since I was hearing a little bit of buzz about this book, I thought what the heck.

Before I lambast it, let me just say that it is thought-provoking, and I like books that challenge my paradigms and stretch my thinking. This one certainly does that, particularly in how it portrays the trinity. (Spoiler warning!) Suffice to say that if you have never envisioned God the Father as a large, boisterous black woman (think Whoopi Goldberg), this book will probably take you a little off guard.

Nutshell version: a guy named Mack loses his youngest daughter to a horrific child-molesting murderer. Two years later, still grieving, he receives a note in his mailbox, ostensibly from God, inviting him to the shack in the woods where his daughter was killed. He goes there, encounters God in a fantastical otherworldly series of events, and basically goes away healed and restored.

Well, anytime you write a book about God, you're going to offend or agitate somebody, and I think this book does a pretty good job of that. Just take a look at the ratings on Amazon — generally, people give it five stars and gush about it, or they give it one star and condemn it. I guess I'm somewhere in the middle. As far as literary quality, I think it tends toward the low end of the scale. Portions of it are really poorly written and downright cheesey. Many elements of the story seem misplaced and underdeveloped. (If you've read it, think about the weird spirit-lady-being that Mack finds in the cave. Huh? What was that?) By the middle of the book I found myself wishing that whoever did the editing for this book had been far more ruthless.

But anything that shakes the tree a little and gives me a different view of the many facets of God's personality — well, I'm open to that. In fact, I rather like the fact that this book seems to really hone in on the loving, nurturing facets of God's character ... mostly because I think the church universal is a little too uptight for its own good and could use a good dose of love/nurture to counteract the centuries of penance/guilt in which it's been steeped.

Howevah! If you're looking to this book as a source of theological truth, don't. Repeat after me: it is just a fable. Treat it about the same as you would treat Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Take what works for you (there is some good allegory) and leave the rest (there's a lot to leave, trust me).

My biggest complaint about the book actually has nothing to do with the plot or the theme or the writing quality. It's the shameless self-promotion at the end. After finishing the book, you find several pages that urge you to tell all your friends about the book, write positive book reviews about the book, buy multiple copies of the book and give it away to friends, post on online bulletin boards about how great the book is. Please. That, too me, is just slimey.