The Good Parts by Evann Normandin is a debut novel about a couple – Rose and Landon – who meet in college in Vermont and fall in love. When the book opens, we learn that many years later, Rose has moved to Edinburgh and taken a pill that allows her to erase her memory and start over with a clean slate. She has cut ties with Landon, who, still in love with Rose, follows her to Scotland to try to win her back, presenting himself as a different person. The story is told in layers, slowly peeling back their history so that we eventually find out what caused the demise of their relationship. Meanwhile, in the present day, they start to build back their relationship on new footing. This is an interesting premise for a book – what if we could simply erase the bad things that happened to us and move on? Would we be the same people? The execution wasn’t as good as the premise, though. Normandin makes Rose pretty opaque in the present day, so I didn’t get much of a sense of what it was like to take the pill, or even to make the decision to take the pill. I didn’t mind all the big emotions in the book but in the end, I just didn’t feel that invested for some reason. Perhaps Normandin spent too long on the origin story and not enough on the end. And sad to say, I have hardly thought about The Good Parts since I finished it – never a great sign. So this one was just OK for me.