I’ve read a lot of blurbs and reviews about Wm. Paul Young’s The Shack – how it will make one religious or spiritual even if one isn’t a church-goer going into the novel, how it will give those who read it a new outlook on life – and I had dismissed them as fanatics trying to promote a book about religion just to get press coverage. But I decided to check it out anyway, because a good read is a good read no matter the subject matter or the hype that it gets.

After having a trek through the woods with The Shack’s main character, Mack, I’ve come to the conclusion that the book really is an overly hyped religious controversy. While it’s a good read, all of the praise about the novel’s ability to change opinions and viewpoints of religion are quite exaggerated and, I feel, are giving the book a more negative connotation than it deserves.

Young’s novel is very much a philosophical dialogue on religion and the current state of beliefs – it resembles some of Plato’s dialogues without taking on overly sophisticated speech or diction. In fact, The Shack reads like a common-man’s philosophy.

In the book, a man named Mack gets a letter from God, supposedly, to come to a shack out in the middle of the wilderness where his daughter had been taken a murdered a year or two before. Mack has still not come to grips with the emotional turmoil inside of him, and has been taken over by a Great Sadness, one which does not allow him to forgive or understand God’s actions. As Mack stays at the shack for a weekend, he is transported to a new world, one in which God, Jesus, and a deity named Sarayu are all helping Mack to understand his pain and to forgive those who have caused it, while also accepting God into his heart.

The first part of the novel is dedicated to meeting Mack and his haunting experience of his daughter’s kidnapping and subsequent death at the hands of a child killer. It’s a harrowing, visceral and taut sequence, rife with psychological drama from Mack which makes this part of the novel intense, if not exactly original.

But then we get to the sequences with God, Jesus, and Sarayu. The characters are likable enough, as they should be – they are, after all, the almighty God broken into three pieces to guide Mack. As Mack struggles through conversations with God about his ways and Mack’s own beliefs, there’s a lot of explanations about religious teachings that are quite interesting. One that stuck out was the fact that God doesn’t exactly like organized religion. This is where a lot of the religious criticism comes into play, as Young characterizes God as someone who doesn’t want to punish the sinners and he also doesn’t care if you pray to him. He plays a waiting game of letting the people of the world choose whether they want to let God into their hearts, which is more of what I think of when I imagine God.

The dialogues between God and Mack go on forever though, and there’s a lull in the middle of the book where there’s a lot of talking but not a lot of doing going on. It evens out towards the end, in a very transcendental moment where Mack finds his daughters body, but I felt that the middle portion of the novel was a tad flat.

And although the book is supposed to have an uplifting message (which it succeeds at), some parts feel a little too goody-goody for my tastes. Mack seems to like every person he comes in contact with, which is pretty unbelievable. All of the characters – well, minus the serial killer, of course – are instantly likable but they all feel really similar to each other.

But what about the spiritual nature of the book? It’s fascinating, it’s entertaining, but one has to remember that it’s still a fictional story about God, not a true biography of Him. It changed my stereotypical views of God and got me thinking in new directions about what Heaven and Hell and sin and sainthood mean in our man-made realities, but it didn’t change my spiritual beliefs or make me convert from my agnostic beliefs. I think that if one’s spiritual beliefs were swayed so easily by a fictional book, that person did not have very strong beliefs or opinions at all. The book is a great read, but it shouldn’t be so easily persuasive.

Don’t get my qualms about the book’s ability to bring about an epiphany wrong, though; it’s an emotional ride that’s at some points sad and at others absolutely mouth-crackingly happy, and its views of a higher being are insightful, well thought-out, and philosophical. But it’s not going to make the devoted worshipers happy because of its stand against religion, and it won’t make non-believers convert. But at least it’s not too preachy, and the religious aspect is not a turn-off like I expected it to be. No religious experience required here.