Some love stories ask what happens when two people find each other. This one asks a stranger question: what happens when one of them decides to unfind the other on purpose? The Good Parts by Evann Normandin opens with a letter that arrives eleven hours too late and a woman who has swallowed a pill to erase the life she shared with the man who wrote it. From that quiet, wrenching premise, Normandin builds a debut that is tender, sly, and morally slippery in the best possible way.
The Setup: A Second First Meeting
Landon Calloway has spent years memorizing every detail of Rose, from the smudge of lipstick on her teeth the night they met to the exact rhythm she taps on his palm to calm his nerves. Rose has spent one afternoon undoing all of it. She has taken the forgetting pill, a treatment that wipes away grief and history in equal measure, and started over in Edinburgh with a new city, a new job, and a new man named Graham. Landon cannot accept that the story is finished. So he does something reckless and a little frightening: he flies across the ocean and reintroduces himself to his own wife as a man she has never met.
That single decision is the engine of the whole thing, and it is what makes The Good Parts by Evann Normandin feel less like a straightforward romance and more like a moral experiment. Rose has no idea that her charming new friend is carrying the entire weight of their shared past. The reader knows everything. Normandin wrings real tension out of that gap, and to her credit she never quite lets Landon off the hook for it.
Then and Now: How the Two Timelines Work
The novel runs on two clocks that keep speaking to each other. Landon’s chapters play out in the present, under the grey light of a Scottish winter. Rose’s chapters reach back to a small Vermont college, where a shy girl in a borrowed black dress talks herself into becoming someone bolder. Watching young Rose fall in love while present-day Rose has no memory of any of it gives the book a lovely, low ache. You already know how the romance ends before it has properly begun, which quietly tints even the happiest scenes with sadness.
The People Who Fill It
Normandin is generous with her supporting cast, and the ensemble is one of the book’s real pleasures:
- Rose reads as two women at once: the guarded student teaching herself to want things, and the light, unburdened stranger she becomes once the past is gone.
- Landon is easy to love and easy to worry about, a devoted man whose loyalty keeps tipping toward something far less noble.
- Poppy, Rose’s college roommate, is the sharp, funny, ferociously protective friend the story needs, and she walks off with most of its best lines.
- Conor and Graham provide warmth and ballast, each acting as a soft-spoken conscience Landon would rather not hear.
What the Book Is Really About
Underneath the speculative hook sits a very old question. If you could set down your grief and keep only the good parts of a life, would you? Normandin is clearly fascinated by memory, and she braids the chosen kind of forgetting against the involuntary kind, giving Rose a father whose mind is slipping away without his consent. The contrast is handled with a light hand, but it lingers. The book keeps circling the idea that the painful memories and the tender ones are stitched from the same thread, and that tugging at one risks pulling the other loose along with it.
What Lands
There is plenty to admire The Good Parts by Evann Normandin, and much of it comes down to craft:
- The central conceit is handled with restraint. The pill never curdles into a gimmick; it stays a human question about loss and choice.
- The prose is warm and watchful, thick with the tiny sensory details that make a long marriage feel lived in rather than described.
- The humor is dry and well placed, which keeps the sadness from turning airless.
- The moral discomfort is intentional. Normandin lets you squirm at what Landon is doing instead of tidying it into something heroic.
Where It Wavers
A four-star book earns its honest notes alongside the praise, and The Good Parts by Evann Normandin collects a few:
- The middle stretch loses some momentum. A handful of the Edinburgh outings start to blur together before the final act pulls everything taut again.
- The rules of the pill stay deliberately hazy. Readers who like their speculative machinery fully explained may find the mechanics too thin to lean on.
- One or two secondary figures exist mainly to voice a theme, and they never fully come alive on their own terms.
None of this sinks the book. It simply keeps a very good novel a step short of a flawless one.
The Voice on the Page
Normandin writes like a person who has spent a long time thinking about how remembering actually works, which tracks with her background studying traumatic memory in Edinburgh. Her sentences are clean and quietly musical, and she trusts her reader to feel things without being instructed when to feel them. The college chapters are especially fine, catching that particular vertigo of reinventing yourself and half believing the old self is dead and buried.
Who Will Love It
Readers who ached their way through One Day, In Five Years, or Me Before You will recognize this emotional weather, now bent through a speculative lens that gives familiar feelings a fresh, uneasy shape. This is book club fiction with teeth: easy to read, hard to shake, and built for long arguments about whether Landon is a romantic or a liar, and whether those two things are ever truly separate.
If You Liked It, Try These
- In Five Years by Rebecca Serle, for a grounded love story tilted by one impossible premise.
- One Day by David Nicholls, for romance measured out across years and near misses.
- The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, for a great love told stubbornly out of order.
- Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, for gentle magical realism about memory and regret.
- The Measure by Nikki Erlick, for another book club novel built on a single haunting what if.
The Verdict
The Good Parts by Evann Normandin is a confident and emotionally intelligent debut that hands a science fiction idea to a very literary heart. It stumbles a little in the middle and leaves some of its own rules blurry on purpose, yet it earns its feeling honestly and lands its final pages with real grace. As a first novel that is a genuine accomplishment, and it marks Normandin as a writer worth watching. The clever premise gets you in the door. The small, true, unbearably human moments are what keep you there.