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!

Okay, so my friends who know me know I am a Pagan so they might get a little chuckle out of me reading The Shack but the idea of it made me curious. Not only that, but I wanted to see the movie as well and I am a big one for the read it first challenge after all! The bottom line is I really liked this book, I can only imagine that kind of grief that a parent must feel when something like this happens. Not only the loss of a child, but the horrific way that it happened. There is just no way I can see how I would handle that, so I was interested in how Mack dealt with it. How it seemed he had all but died right along with this youngest during what happened. It is getting that mysterious note from Papa and actually having to deal with the grief that brings him back to life. How easy it is to allow our pain and grief to control us, it’s harder to learn to live again. Whether you believe in God or don’t whether you think there is more than one God or none this book will make you think, it can also truly help if you are looking for a way to understand things in your own life. It might be a work of fiction, but I truly feel it has a place in the real world as well.

My Gemstone Rating:

Set in northwest London, Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragicomic novel follows four locals—Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan—as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. In private houses and public parks, at work and at play, these Londoners inhabit a complicated place, as beautiful as it is brutal, where the thoroughfares hide the back alleys and taking the high road can sometimes lead you to a dead end. Depicting the modern urban zone—familiar to city-dwellers everywhere—NW is a quietly devastating novel of encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself

Going in I really wanted to like this book more than I ended up liking it. I knew it would be edgy and I knew it would be uncomfortable and it was all of those things, but man oh man this book is just, yikes. It is hard to come up with the right words to say about this one but yikes is. The style of this book is impossible, I have not seen it before and I really hope I don’t see it again because it is really hard to deal with. There are so many characters, so many situations and really nothing gets resolved. This book just leaves you (well me for sure) feeling very just empty and confused. Books should have a beginning, a middle and an end and for me this book really doesn’t.

There are some moments that made it interesting and that is why there are two gems (stars) rewarded. The moment when a character is knifed (I won’t say who so I don’t spoil it too much) is shocking, and it is supposed to be. Watching it unfold in the movie that was made based on the book as well made it even more shocking and jaw dropping. Of course it is supposed to be, the image of someone dying at all but especially for such a pointless reason is not comfortable and never should be.

I guess I can understand why some people love this book, but I just couldn’t really connect at all with it. I might try another book by this author, but if it is the same style I will probably have to give it a pass. Bottom line I really wouldn’t recommend this one.

My Gemstone Rating: