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: