The Shack

I heard of The Shack from Nathan Bransford's blog and one of my co-workers. They said it was a good read. So when I found myself in an airport at Atlanta, Georgia on my way back to New York, I ended up buying the book. I must say, I was surprised. It's one of the best reads I've had in a while.

The book jacket says it all:
Mackenzie Allen Philip's 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 week-end.
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 and you know to read this book!

The phenomenal journey of this book began when William Paul Young decided to write a story about what he felt his children should know about his own dark night of the soul. No, according to him, he didn't have a child who was abducted or killed, but that he had that Great Sadness that his protagonist had. Then when he gave it to his friends and family to read, the story kept changing hands so much so that they encouraged him to publish it. In fact, two people from California that time when it was still in its bound format wanted to fly to Oregon to meet his protagonist personally thinking that Mack was a real person! So there is a current of energy, a kind of consciousness that this book raises that have people itching to pass it on. That's amazing. No publisher, religious or mainstream, would touch this book when Young tried to submit. So he and three other friends decided to open their own publishing company with only one book - his. Their first print was 11,000 copies and it was sold within two months. This book that didn't fit in to any category has found success much like Twilight (not that I'm a huge fan).

I'm not laughing at self-publishing now.