Book Review: The Shack by William P. Young

The Shack by William P. Young is an amazing tale that follows the life of Mack an ordinary family man who finds himself cast into a long period of depression after his young daughter is brutally kidnapped and murdered. The story starts with a back story of Mack's life that most can relate to well, a story of being raised by abusive parents and still learning to grow up relatively normal and find some sort of personal faith in God.

Years after Mack's daughter is murdered he slowly looses faith and sinks further into depression. Then one day a strange letter arrives asking him to meet "Papa" in the same shack when his daughter's life was taken. "Papa" as the book explains is his family's pet name for God, after much debating and soul searching Mack begins his journey to the shack and encounters the Holy Spirit in ways he never dreamed. I do not want to give away the entire story, but this is an amazing book for anyone who has suffered tragedy and loss. The book shows how God can heal emotional wounds no mater how deep and long they are.

This book has topped the New York Times Best Seller list for both hardcover and paperback editions, but before that it sold well as a self published book that the author and several friends had put out and sold via the internet. This original manuscript attracted much attention just by word of mouth from friends and family that distributed photocopies after each one had read it. Over the course of a couple months it had snowballed from being a small writing project that the author planned to make only a few copies for his children to several thousand copies being distributed underground by each person who read it and had to share this great story with a friend. This street buzz lead to several major publishers offering to publish the book, many of whom had rejected the book several times before when the author original had offered the manuscript to them. William P. Young and his team of friends involved in the birth of the self published book soon saw they where on the verge of something big and decided to keep the book sort of self published by forming Windblown Media to take the novel to a new level of mass marketed publication.

The author is currently working with his team of editors and writer friends to adapt "THE SHACK" in to a movie script. He already has several offers from major movie studios to film his adaptation of this novel, but Mr. Young is sticking to his God given calling to ensure that Hollywood does not change or manipulate this amazing story into another piece of celluloid fluff.