The Shack, by William P. Young (Windblown Media, $14.99), has been on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for weeks. I confess that I don’t check the Times’ list regularly, but heard about the book as I understand many people have, by word of mouth. I heard about it from another lector at my parish; others have heard about it from friends; one even found herself discussing it with her mail carrier.

It’s the kind of book that makes you want to spread the word about it, makes you want other people to read it too. It’s also the kind of book to which many people have a first reaction of “I don’t know…”

When I read it first, I knew I’d want to read it again. On first reading, I wanted to find out what happened next in the story and so read quickly; the second time through I was able to be more thoughtful as I read.

I don’t want to give the plot away, so I’ll just say that it’s a story of a man who receives an unusual invitation and, when he skeptically goes to the appointed place—the shack—has an extraordinary experience of spending a weekend with the Trinity.

While admitting that the book has flaws, everyone I’ve spoken to about it has said that it made him or her think differently about God. The major problem is that because the author portrays the one God as three distinct persons in perfect communion (which meets the definition, I think, but is something about which we don’t often think), the reader can be confused into thinking that there are three gods—as the protagonist sometimes is confused, even though the various Persons keep reminding him of their unity.

I found most delightful a phrase the Creator uses frequently whenever discussion with the protagonist turns to another human being: God always says, “I am especially fond of him” or “of her.” I think that’s because I’ve always had to struggle with the idea that God might actually be especially fond of me. That’s not false humility, but a slightly neurotic conviction that I’m not exactly special. Only after years of praying for the grace to believe that God really loves me did I have an “aha!” moment when I knew God had created me on purpose, with my particular gifts and deficits, because God wanted to create exactly such a person. So when, in the book, God says with offhanded sincerity, “Oh, yes, I’m especially fond of her,” it allowed me to imagine God saying such a thing about me.

There’s much more to the book than that, and I recommend it highly—with the caveat that one must remember it’s fiction. It tackles some of the hardest questions we face as people of faith, from the nature of the Trinity to the suffering of innocents, and helps us to shift the prism through which we look at those questions in order to display them in a new way. I can’t guarantee that it’s totally orthodox, but neither do I see it as a danger to anyone’s Christian faith. And anything that gets friends and strangers talking to each other about God has got to be a good thing.