This was a quick read. The first half read like a mystery with 84 Charing Cross Road echoes. The protagonists, Stephane and Helene, uncovered more and more photos and evidence of their respective parents' connections, while growing closer themselves. In the second half the mystery was clarified more by way of letters 'to be read in the event of my death', and conveniently discovered journals, and it lost the mystery atmosphere and just became very very sad. ( )

This was a random pick from the library shelves, and I guess it was OK. It's a slowly unraveling mystery and to my mind the slowness of the unraveling felt a bit annoying. Highly unlikely plot devices were used to signal that something interesting was coming up but we weren't allowed to know. The main female character kept really important documents unread for unbelievable amounts of time. We were finding lots of mysterious aspects of the story and then a conveniently long lost letter or diary entry was found to fill in lots of gaps all at once and yet usually - and predictably - leave an important element unresolved. Further, the two main characters seemed to fall in love without any good reason - we didn't see enough of their relationship to understand why they fell for each other, and yet that seemed inevitable from page 1. ( )

While I admired and enjoyed aspects of this book I have to say I found myself underwhelmed by the end. I really didn't buy into some of the actions of the characters at the latter parts of the book.
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3.5 After her Father's death, Helene is sorting through his papers when she finds a photograph of her mother at a tennis tournament, with two unknown young men. Knowing very little about her mother except that she died in an accident when Helene was four, she places an advert with the photo in the newspapers. She receives a reply from a young biologist in Switzerland who claims one of the men in the photo is his late father.

From there, in a series of letter, e-mails and postcards, Helene and Stéphane attempt to solve the mystery of her mother and the fact that her father would never mention her name, and his father and his depressive, aloof nature.

I enjoyed this easy but poignant read. As they unravel clues, letters and at last journals from a friend of both parents and the letter left from her adopted mother after her death, they at last learn the true story. They also form a personal relationship, but will that survive the knowledge they now have on how their parents were connected? Can they forgive what they learn of their parents actions and can they now move forward? ( )

Have you ever gone through piles of old photographs and wondered who the people in them are or why the person who kept them did so? When we take a photograph, it tells a story, but that story is lost if no one continues to tell it or to know it. Just as the images themselves fade, so too do the histories behind the photos, if their stories aren't passed along. In Helene Gestern's lovely epistolary novel, The People in the Photo, the important story of a woman's mother is in danger of being lost to time and memory until she finds a photograph and embarks on a quest to uncover her mother's history and that of her own.

Helene was raised by her father and stepmother, who never spoke at all about the mother who died when she was just four years old. When she, as an adult, finds a photograph of her mother and two unknown men in an old newspaper clipping, she advertises to see if she can find out any information about the woman who has long been nothing more than a cypher in her life. Helene's father is dead and her stepmother no longer has memories to share so Helene, an archivist by trade, is determined to find out what information she can. A man named Stephane writes back to her identifying not only his father but his godfather as the other two people in the photo. Between Helene and Stephane then, they start to construct a tale that stretches far beyond the photo. As their letters and emails show, they have a flourishing correspondence and a matching keenness to uncover personal history.

Their letters show a remarkable gradual opening up and sharing of their current lives as well as their speculations, sometimes confirmed and sometimes refuted, about the past. They start off carefully and guardedly but eventually feel free to divulge the hurts of their pasts, perhaps because of the initial facelessness of their correspondence. The letters also show a growing affinity for each other even as they grapple with apprehensiveness about what they might uncover. In their explorations they flesh out Natasha, called Nathalie, and Peter beyond the flat confines of the original photo and all those photos that follow. The story, written as it is, is a slow unveiling of the truth, beautifully paced, even incorporating realistic gaps of time due to either Helene and Stephane's discomfort with the findings.

Uniquely and wonderfully effective in terms of the presentation of the story, each set of letters and emails is interleaved with descriptions of photographs that both illuminate and present more secrets for Helene and Stephane to tease out. Gestern has written an elegant and considered novel, a melancholy and aching tale of one love that cannot be and one that can. In the end, the connection between Helene and Stephane is not surprising although the details are simple and affecting. The novel is moody and atmospheric as they search for their parents' truths and bravely dig past the long silence. This is an incredibly quick read, a fascinating look at love and memory, and the part the past, even the unknown past, plays in our present and our very identity. ( )