The Shack-Review

[khudecek]

The book starts out with little Missy getting kidnapped and murdered and evolves around how her father was so grief-stricken (who can blame him?) and then he gets a note from "Papa" in his mailbox during an ice storm when the mail can't even get to his house. The note is an invitation to to the shack where the police had found evidence of Missy's murder three years earlier.

The story is about events that unfold in the shack. It's moving, heartbreaking at times, a little humorous. It's just a great book!

I wondered if it was true. I'm glad I didn't check out that fact until after I was done. I have to think that this guy is onto something, though. I do think that when writers start writing, they "see" things and I think he had a heck of a vision or experience or something along those lines. It's very hard to make up something like this.

I can't say anything more than what the author said.

"Is the story ‘real’? The story is fiction. I made it up. Now, having said that, I will add that the emotional pain with all its intensity and the process that tears into Mack’s heart and soul are very real. I have my ‘shack’, the place I had to go through to find healing. I have my Great Sadness…that is all real. And the conversations are very real and true. While Mack experiences some particulars that I have not (the death of my niece the day after her fifth birthday was a horrible accident, but not a murder), there are depths of pain and shame and hopelessness that I have experienced, that Mack did not. And I know people who have suffered exactly what Mack suffers in the story.


So is the story true? The pain, the loss, the grief, the process, the conversations, the questions, the anger, the longing, the secrets, the lies, the forgiveness…all real, all true. The story in particular… fiction… but…. Then there is God who emerges so very real and true, unexpected and yet not unexpected, but surprising and…

So… is all this real? Is all this true? I suppose each of us has to decide for ourselves, don’t we?"