The Shack - A contemporary spiritual tale of healing

Amazon site: http://www.amazon.com/Shack-William-P-Young/dp/0964729237


Maybe this book has already been discussed in this forum.
I've been hearing about this book, titled The Shack here and there, but haven't read it...though I'm tempted to mainly because it seems to have touched a lot of people. Would love to get your impressions if you've read this book.

Here's one review:

Mr. Nowak, a maintenance worker near Yakima, Wash., first bought a copy of “The Shack,” a slim paperback novel by an unknown author about a grieving father who meets God in the form of a jolly African-American woman, at a Borders bookstore in March. He was so taken by the story of redemption and God’s love that he promptly bought 10 more copies to give to family and friends.

“Everybody that I know has bought at least 10 copies,” Mr. Nowak said. “There’s definitely something about the book that makes people want to share it.”

Thousands of readers like Mr. Nowak, a regular churchgoer, have helped propel “The Shack,” written by William P. Young, a former office manager and hotel night clerk in Gresham, Ore., and privately published by a pair of former pastors near Los Angeles, into a surprise best seller. It is the most compelling recent example of how a word-of-mouth phenomenon can explode into a blockbuster when the momentum hits chain bookstores, and the marketing and distribution power of a major commercial publisher is thrown behind it.

Just over a year after it was originally published as a paperback, “The Shack” had its debut at No. 1 on the New York Times trade paperback fiction best-seller list on June 8 and has stayed there ever since. It is No. 1 on Borders Group’s trade paperback fiction list, and at Barnes & Noble it has been No. 1 on the trade paperback list since the end of May, outselling even Mr. Tolle’s spiritual guide “A New Earth,” selected by Ms. Winfrey’s book club in January.

Its publisher, Windblown Media, a company that was formed expressly to publish “The Shack” in May of last year, estimates that the book has sold more than one million copies. According to Nielsen Bookscan, which usually tracks about 70 percent of sales, the book has sold about 350,000 copies, although those numbers do not include sales at stores like Wal-Mart or direct sales from the publisher’s Web site, theshackbook.com, which may have accounted for an unusually large percentage of the book’s sales.

Early in the novel the young daughter of the protagonist, Mack, is abducted. Four years later he visits the shack where evidence of the girl’s murder was discovered. He spends a weekend there in a kind of spiritual therapy session with God, who calls herself “Papa”; Jesus, who appears as a Jewish workman; and Sarayu, an indeterminately Asian woman who incarnates the Holy Spirit...cont'd

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/books/24shack.html?em



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Excerpt:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/books/24shack-excerpt.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1

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Website: http://theshackbook.com/

No surprises and pretty much how I relate to God. I have called him Papa for years.

it though. It's been labeled as part of the "Emergent" movement. I notice that some Evangelicals (ie Dan Kimball) who at first embraced the "Emergent" are now distancing themselves. Emergent folks like McLaren, and this book are a bit too "progressive" for some.

I'm all for anything that promotes mutual respect, inclusion, love, peace, understanding and the notion of "universalism". A god that loves "it's creation", everyone and everything in it - guess it seems like a novel idea to some.

To me, the book still leaves one too focused on the self, "it's all about me" sort of mentality but that could be a great step forward away from judging others as needing to be "saved" and then obnoxiously trying to "save" them.

snip>

But some booksellers said they were not sure that non-Christian readers were interested. At Rainy Day Books, a literary independent bookstore near Kansas City, Mo., Vivien Jennings, the owner, said she had sold only nine copies in four months. “The buzz never made it here,” she said. “What it tells me is that it is still pretty much restricted to the Christian audience.”