The candle on the kitchen counter is shaped like a mitten and smells of pine. Clyde, a lanky business student with red hair and suspenders who has moved in upstairs that morning, has lit it and closed his eyes, and when sixteen-year-old Caspen touches his shoulder to say goodbye, the floor drops away. A breath later the two of them are standing in a snowbound forest under a bright moon, walking toward a bonfire where a girl waits with hot cocoa. Nobody there can see Caspen. Nobody, that is, except a burly teenage boy chopping firewood a few feet away, whose axe has been glued to his palm by an absurd quantity of sap. Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch keeps that combination of ache and slapstick going for almost three hundred pages, and it is the reason the book works even when its machinery creaks.
What Just the Good Parts Knows About Scent
The premise is simple to state and slippery to pin down. Caspen’s father disappeared six months earlier from the half-renovated flat at the top of the family’s building, above the candle shop his grandfather founded in a Northern Michigan lakeside town. The police have their theory and have stopped looking. Now three college students rent that flat, each is given a candle from the shop, and each candle unlocks a memory Caspen can walk into. He is sure the scents are his father’s doing, a trail of breadcrumbs left in the shop’s own stock. His mother, meanwhile, seems in a hurry to move on, renting out the flat that should have been her husband’s and nagging Caspen about whether he has been outside today, and his loyalty to the missing man hardens into resentment of the woman still standing in front of him.
The book is sharp about how smell works on the mind, the way a fragrance can hand back a whole afternoon before thought has a chance to intervene, what psychologists call involuntary memory. Couch turns that into a structure. Each visit replays a scene in the tenants’ lives, and each replay shows Caspen something he missed the first time. On a second trip to a wedding on the Mediterranean coast, a wall of storm clouds he somehow never noticed is rolling in over the beach. That detail is the quiet thesis of Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch: a person who looks only for sunshine will not see the weather.
The Tenants Steal the Show
The three roommates are the novel’s best invention. Buck is anxious about leases and furniture until he is cooking, when he turns into a hip-hop-dancing host; in his memory, his father’s disappointment over an underripe caprese salad says everything about the restaurant he is expected to inherit. His other great prop is a trophy for a meatball-eating contest that looks like a concrete planet. Ana is the bubbly one buried in note cards whose autumn memory sends Caspen back to a drab classroom and out of the window into an enormous pile of leaves, and whose lecture on the rooftop about starlight, and how we always see things as they were rather than as they are, lands harder on a second reading. Clyde, grieving and reckless, turns up with a battered library book about healers who carry messages through fire.
They are funny, kind and a little odd in ways the book eventually accounts for, and they give a grief novel the company it needs. Much of the warmth in Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch comes from these three strangers treating the landlord’s son as one of their own, offering him leftovers, confiding their failures and covering for him when his behaviour gets strange. Quinn, his best friend and the shop’s most capable employee, completes the circle, though she is keeping a secret of her own.
The Boy in the Memories
The romance is the other pleasure. The boy from the woods is Lars, a science-minded pessimist who lands in every memory in a costume that traps him: inside a snowman, wedged into rocks at the beach in snorkel fins a size too small, sweating inside a school mascot’s bird head. Caspen keeps having to free him, and their arguments about counting to three or which candle each of them lit are the most purely enjoyable passages. Their first kiss arrives as a thunderclap rolls over the sand, and it is lovely.
It also arrives with a slight sense of rationing. Lars matters more as a clue than as a person, and the novel spends more care on the puzzle he is part of than on the boy himself. Readers who come to Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch for a love story will find a sweet one, but a brief one.
Where Just the Good Parts Overplays Its Hand
The larger reservation is about how loudly the novel signals its turns. Caspen’s knee keeps bleeding through bandages after a fall he cannot recall, a cowboy-hatted customer repeats himself word for word, and friends stare at him as if he should know something. These are fair clues, and teenage readers will enjoy assembling them, but adult readers will be ahead of Caspen for a long stretch. The final chapters, meanwhile, have characters spell out the meaning in speeches: about rose-tinted glasses, about change, about taking the hard memories with the sweet. The ideas are true. They would land more firmly if the reader were trusted to find them. A short epilogue also resolves the practical problems of the shop a little conveniently.
None of this sinks Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch. The father at its centre is drawn with real nuance, beloved and absent-minded and, his son slowly admits, not always present, and the grief Couch writes about is particular rather than generic. Content warnings are mostly about loss: the long uncertainty of a missing parent, a family coming apart, an illness remembered from the past, and some swearing, with the romance never going beyond kisses.
The Writer Behind the Candles
Each of Robbie Couch’s novels names its reader: his earlier books are billed for the tough ones, the unserious ones, the lonely ones and the grieving ones. Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch is dedicated to the wistful ones, and the label fits. In his acknowledgments he credits a passage from Carlo Rovelli’s physics book The Order of Time, about absence hurting only because of love, as the seed of the story, and the novel shows its working without becoming a lecture.
His previous book, Another First Chance, was also a speculative story about love outlasting a tragedy, so this one reads as a continuation of a long conversation rather than a departure. Couch writes teen fiction for Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, which published this fifth novel on 13 October 2026, and his Michigan childhood shows in every red maple.
Where It Leaves You
Readers who loved the doomed sweetness of The First to Die at the End by Adam Silvera will find a gentler cousin here, and anyone who enjoyed the warmth of The Good Vampire’s Guide to Blood and Boyfriends by Jamie D’Amato will recognise the tone of a queer romance with a supernatural wrinkle. Couch’s own If I See You Again Tomorrow is the natural next step.
What lingers from Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch is less the mechanism than the sensation of standing in somebody else’s favourite day and noticing the clouds. It asks young readers to love people as they were, not as the highlights reel insists they were. That is a hard lesson, and this novel teaches it with a mug of cocoa in one hand.