The Photograph is a sweet, if lightweight, World War II melodrama about one woman’s struggles on the homefront during the war. I almost wrote “two women’s experiences during the war,” which is what the story initially seems to be, but while it has two narrators, this book is only the story of one of them, and she doesn’t experience that much. It’s too bad, because with two stories, it would have been a better book.

Maddy Marshall’s world changes forever on her seventeenth birthday, the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor. When her brother Davey, a Marine, is called to service, he leaves their Pennsylvania hometown for Miami to await his deployment. He sends a letter to his wife, Ruth, telling her and Maddy to come to Florida to be with him.

Maddy is excited about the chance to get away from her controlling mother and see more of the world. In Miami, she and Ruth rent a house from the Siler family, whose son Jack is one of Davey’s fellow Marines, and try to make the most of the time before the men leave. One night at a dance hall, Maddy, Davey, Ruth, Jack and several other Marines pose for a photograph. It has a profound effect on Ruth, who begins to see things in the image that no one else can, things in the faces of the people pictured that tells her what will or has happened to them. When tragedy strikes Maddy and the men leave for war, the photograph becomes a lifeline that keeps them going.

The story is told in first-person in alternating sections by Maddy and Ruth, but this is really only Maddy’s story. Ruth doesn’t do anything but look at the photograph, offer Maddy her support, and wait for her husband to return. Maddy is the main focus, and that’s the main problem with the book.

Maddy is a very immature narrator. That’s probably appropriate for a 17-year-old girl, but it also makes for a shallow read. Since the story is told by an adult Maddie in the past tense, there really should be some maturity in the way she’s looking back at her experiences as a girl. Instead, for the first hundred pages or so, I thought I was reading a young-adult novel. The book opens with Maddy saying she’s decided she’ll never forgive the Japanese for ruining her seventeenth birthday, something you’d think a grown woman would get over, or at least be able to put into perspective with all the people who died there and throughout the war. When she reflects on how she doesn’t want her love interest to go to war, narrator Maddy explains, “I was so glad he’d already done his duty – been wounded and everything.” Maddie is simply too childish and the story is too lightweight to inspire more than mild interest.

Eventually the story settles into a typical women’s fiction plot: plucky women bond together to overcome hardship on the homefront. This type of book seems to engender nearly as many plot devices as traditional romance novels. Translation? Many altogether predictible events occur. The whole story revolves around Maddy’s crisis and the complications it causes, interspersed with letters to and from the men at war (what would a homefront/war book be without them?). This isn’t a very big book and it’s not a very big story.

That isn’t to say it isn’t without its charms. The characters are all sweet, and with the exception of one villain, even the antagonistic characters (all two of them) are good deep down. I laughed at some points, like a Thanksgiving dinner where everyone is forced to eat rabbit because there are no turkeys or chickens to be found, and smiled at others. There are some effective moments, especially a big moment of truth late in the book. That was almost enough for me to bump it up to just above average. But a few effective moments were not enough to save a book where I simply did not care about the characters.

The Photograph is the kind of story that makes me feel like an ogre for not liking it more. It is nice. It is sweet. But no matter how well-written it is (and it is), it’s too simple, in more ways than one. Add in that it’s a paperback story (and a short paperback at that) at a hardcover price, and it’s not a book I can pronounce more than average.