Friday, March 27, 2009

The Shack by William Paul Young

If you are a thinker....If you care about relationships.....If you are seeking happiness and fulfillment.....If you have questions about eternity, God, and spiritual matters.....If you were raised in the church.....if you consider yourself an agnostic.....If you struggle to know "how to live".....you will be glad you read The Shack by William Paul Young.

The Shack is a novel, but it is not like any other novel I have ever read. I started reading it after 9:00 last evening and barely put it down until I finished it and went to bed about 2:00 AM this morning. It is that absorbing.

I was 50 pages into the reading when I realized that I was being challenged to consider what it really means to know God. I was thinking about familiar spiritual concepts in new ways. All this thinking and analyzing was going on while I was also engrossed in the PLOT and the mystery of the storyline. At times I raced through pages to find out what would happen next, and at other times I had to slow down and reread paragraphs to allow myself to fully rethink a spiritual and/or relational concept.

So much of present-day literature is predicable, written-to-formula storyline; but Young has a unique plot, unique characters, and a command of the English language that enables him to present his story and his backstory clearly and interestingly. The result is a book that has the reader laughing one minute, gasping the next, and then stopping to ponder what he/she has just read.

I won't forget this book.

3 comments:

Norma said...

I've got a copy in the car for desperate days, but still haven't read it. So far, the Bible, Martin Luther, and G. Campbell Morgan are challenging enough.

Carol said...

After reading your review of THE SHACK, I realize anew that a book that one person loves will be a book that someone else dislikes. I didn't care for THE SHACK at all. And except for the basic premise, it was totally forgettable to me.

William Paul Young said...

William Paul Young's book, The Shack, spent 43 weeks as the number one book on the New York Times Best Seller List. Good book I say!