The Shack was certainly a thought provoking book for our club. I can’t say that anyone said that the book changed their life as some reviewers out there have said, mostly because everyone realized that this was a work of fiction. Many club members felt that the writing was actually quite poor from a literary standpoint.
Below are a few spoilers:
1. There were some definite take-aways that people got from this book; namely, don’t judge people because you don’t know where they came from.
2. Our discussion didn’t really focus that much on the Holy Trinity aspect of the book or the fact that God was a black woman. People seemed to accept these aspects of the book unlike many other discussions groups that I have read about. Many found the conversations with “The Trinity” kind of hokey and forced.
3. We did focus in on whether or not we thought that this actually happened to Mack or if it was more of a near-death experience. In addition we looked at why this experience required Mack to go back to The Shack, the transformation of The Shack and the finding of Missy’s body from a dream sequence being paralleled to The Wizard of Oz, the passage about seeing God in everyday things and where we see little pointers to God in everyday life, and the fact that the majority of people that don’t have religious beliefs or struggle with religious beliefs do so because they can’t touch or see religion. Lastly we had a brief discussion on how Young seemed to be opposed to organized religion.

Overall, this book was much deeper than we thought it would be upon selection, and the majority of the group agreed that they wouldn’t recommend this book to just anyone.