Some love stories open with a meeting. This one opens with a letter that arrives eleven hours and twelve minutes too late. That small, cruel margin sets everything in motion, and it tells you almost everything you need to know about the kind of writer at work here: precise about time, tender about consequence, and willing to let a single missed moment reshape two lives. The Good Parts by Evann Normandin is the sort of debut that makes you sit very still on the last page, unsure whether you want to talk about it or protect the quiet it leaves behind.
A premise that lives a breath away from real
The speculative hook is deceptively gentle. In this world, a “forgetting pill” can wipe grief clean off the slate. No doctor will prescribe it, but with enough cash and a quiet clinic, you can walk out a person with a blank past and a hopeful morning. Rose has taken it. She has left behind her sorrow, her history, and the husband she once planned forever with. Landon cannot accept that. So he follows her to Edinburgh and steps back into her life as a stranger, betting that a heart that chose him once might choose him again.
What follows is neither thriller nor fairy tale. It sits in the tender space between them, closer to Rebecca Serle or David Nicholls than to any high-concept science fiction. The pill is the door, not the room. Normandin is far more interested in what love owes memory, and whether a story you no longer remember still belongs to you.
A book that moves in two directions at once
The structure is the engine. Landon’s chapters unfold in the present, in a rainy, ghost-haunted Edinburgh where he auditions for a place in a life he already lived. Rose’s chapters travel backward through the past, from a shy girl in an outrageous black dress at a Vermont college party to the woman who eventually reached for that pill. The two timelines circle each other like planets, and the pull between them generates a steady, aching tension.
Because we learn what was lost while watching Landon try to rebuild it, nearly every warm scene carries a shadow. That dramatic irony is where The Good Parts by Evann Normandin is at its most confident. You keep turning pages not to find out what happens, exactly, but to understand how these two people arrived at a place where forgetting felt like mercy.
A few of the things the novel does especially well:
- The Edinburgh atmosphere. The fog, the closes, the underground vault tours, the whisky bars along the Royal Mile. The city becomes a place built on buried things, which is a quietly perfect setting for a story about buried history.
- The banter. Landon says the right thing at the wrong time and the wrong thing at the right time, and the dialogue crackles because of it. The humor keeps the sorrow from curdling into melodrama.
- The restraint at the center. There is a loss at the heart of this marriage, and Normandin refuses to milk it. She trusts small details to do the heavy lifting, and they do.
- The secondary cast. Poppy, Rose’s caustic and fiercely loyal college roommate, and Conor, Landon’s tender giant of a best friend, are drawn with enough life to anchor the whole book.
Two people worth remembering
Rose is the novel’s real triumph. We meet her as a self-described broken girl who decides, almost by accident, to become someone who wears bold and beautiful things. Watching her grow into her own boldness, then watching that same fierceness turn inward under grief, gives the past timeline its gravity. She is funny, sharp, and prickly in a way that reads as human rather than quirky.
Landon is a thornier proposition, and the book knows it. His devotion curdles easily into something possessive, and the plot he sets in motion, inserting himself into Rose’s new life under a borrowed name, is ethically slippery. To her credit, Normandin does not let him off the hook. Poppy names the problem out loud, more than once, and the story keeps asking whether love gives anyone the right to decide how another person heals. Readers who need a hero to root for cleanly may struggle with him. Readers who like their romance complicated will find him fascinating.
Prose that knows when to hold back
Stylistically, Normandin writes with a lush, literary hand that stays mostly disciplined. She reaches for images drawn from weather, water, and the body, and her recurring insistence that the body remembers what the mind tries to bury gives the book a spine. The author earned an MSc focused on traumatic memory at the University of Edinburgh and a degree in English and theater at a small Vermont college, and both settings clearly feed the novel’s authenticity. This is a writer describing rooms she has stood in and ideas she has genuinely wrestled with, and much of the emotional credibility of The Good Parts by Evann Normandin flows from that lived-in quality.
That said, the writing is not flawless, and an honest review should say so.
- Pacing dips in the present timeline. Some of Landon’s Edinburgh scenes linger past their usefulness, and the momentum sags in the middle third before the two timelines start to converge.
- The pill stays deliberately fuzzy. The mechanics of how it works, and why it sometimes fails, are kept vague. That vagueness serves the emotional aims but will frustrate readers who want the speculative rules to hold together.
- A handful of metaphors overreach. Now and then an image strains for profundity and lands with a slightly hollow ring.
- The dual structure telegraphs a few turns. Attentive readers will guess where certain reveals are heading well before the characters do.
None of these are fatal. They are the ordinary growing pains of an ambitious debut, and they explain why many readers land on a warm, admiring response rather than an unqualified rave.
Who should read this
Reach for this novel if you love aching, character-first romance with a literary sensibility and a speculative twist. It suits readers who enjoy dual timelines, morally complicated leads, and books that treat grief with real seriousness. Sensitive readers should know it deals frankly with loss, infidelity, and a parent’s worst fear, so the emotional weather runs heavy. It is a book club natural, the kind of story that will start arguments about whether Landon deserves forgiveness.
Read these next
If The Good Parts by Evann Normandin moves you, these make excellent companions:
- One Day by David Nicholls
- In Five Years by Rebecca Serle
- Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
- Love and Other Words by Christina Lauren
- The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin
- Still Alice by Lisa Genova, for a different angle on memory and identity
The verdict
The Good Parts by Evann Normandin is a poignant, quietly wise first novel that trusts its readers and mostly earns that trust. It stumbles in a few of the usual debut ways, and its hero will divide the room, but its questions linger long after the final chapter. If you could keep only the good parts of a love, would you? Normandin makes the answer far less obvious than you expect, and that is a lovely, unsettling thing for a book to do.
