“If anything matters then everything matters. Because you are important, everything you do is important. Every time you forgive, the universe changes; every time you reach out and touch a heart or a life, the world changes; with every kindness and service, seen or unseen, my purposes are accomplished and nothing will every be the same again.”
~William P. Young in The Shack

Mackenzie Allen Philips’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 the Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend.

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 irreverent, The Shack wrestles with the timeless question: Where is God in a world filled with unspeakable pain? The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as they did him. You’ll want everyone you know to read this book!

Make sure you have a few, uninterrupted hours available when you read Melanie Wells’s My Soul To Keep, because you certainly will not want to put it down.

At 35, Dylan Foster is in the prime of academia but she lives alone, and has very few friends. She’s is a Psych Professor at a Methodist University and her specialty will come in handy as you explore her tale. You will immediately be taken in by her story and the nightmares that surround her. The few close friends she does have are not spared from her perpetual bad luck. She is incredibly real and so is her life. You will relate, even in ways you wish you didn’t. She’s the best friend you just want to wrap your arms around and support. You will meet her deepest enemy, Peter Terry and will find yourself hating him even more than she does.

This book and I were very close companions. Melanie Wells has a way of creating characters who are so real, you grow to care about. She has you in circles sharing Dylan’s despair and elation. The attention she gives spiritual matters and happenings is like that of Frank Peretti. To say I loved it wouldn’t even touch the tip. I absolutely loved this book, beyond normal book-love standards. I want to send a copy to every single woman I am close to.

Reviewed by: Mandy Hutchinson