The tables by the door of Coolsby Candle Company are supposed to look like autumn on steroids: pine cones, fake leaves, towers of pumpkin and maple scents, and a box of old festival photos, including every year that a Coolsby man cut the Red Fest ribbon in a suit printed with maple leaves. This October there is a sign with a QR code and a mirror inviting customers to take a selfie with a candle. Caspen, sixteen, reads it as his mother erasing his father, who walked upstairs to finish renovating the empty top-floor flat six months ago and never came down. Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch begins with that fight over two shop tables, and it turns out to be the whole book in miniature: what a family keeps on display, and what it quietly packs away.

The Father on the Pedestal

The supernatural engine arrives on page one of the plot. Three college students rent the renovated flat, Caspen’s mother leaves a candle on the counter for each of them, and when he rests a hand on a tenant’s shoulder while that tenant breathes in a scent, Caspen falls through white light into the memory it calls up. He cannot be seen there and his footprints vanish in the snow. He decides at once that this is his father, reaching out through the shop’s own stock, and he goes looking for clues.

The memory travel is the hook, but the stronger thread in Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch is the father Caspen carries in his head. Kevin Coolsby is a scatterbrained, beloved local fixture who loses his tape measure in plain sight, keeps a black licorice candle in stock that nobody asks for, and talks about the day his son will run the shop. Caspen will hear nothing against him. His best friend Quinn declares herself Switzerland when the displays come up, and Caspen takes her neutrality as a betrayal.

Couch is patient about taking that idol apart. The best scene in the novel is a stress-baking session in which Caspen demands the real reason for his parents’ divorce, and his mother answers question by question while slowly disappearing under a burst bag of powdered sugar. Her case is not about an affair. It is about arithmetic: three extra staff the shop could afford, the forty days a year the family might have had together, and the father who chose control of the store anyway. Then she names two of Caspen’s photography exhibitions that his father missed, and he realizes that he had filed both evenings away somewhere he never looks. It is a quiet, adult piece of writing in a book for teenagers, and it gives the story its real subject, which is selective memory as a way of loving someone.

The small-town texture helps. A police chief buying a cinnamon candle for his wife’s birthday gets an icy interrogation at the register, and Couch makes that scene sting by letting the chief be decent and the boy be unfair.

Just the Good Parts and the Boy Who Gets Stuck

Running against the grief is a romance, and it is where the novel has its fun. In every memory Caspen meets the same boy, Lars, who can see and hear him when nobody else can. Lars always arrives in an outfit that does not belong to him and is always trapped by it, most memorably pinned against an Italian church wall by an enormous harp while dressed in a leopard-print tuxedo at a stranger’s wedding. He is a self-described science nerd from Washington, DC, with a rocket emoji in his bio and a place at MIT that he may turn down so as not to leave his mother alone.

The banter in Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch is sweet, and the pair’s rule-testing has a pleasing detective rhythm: which candle did each of them light, why does time pass differently for him, what does the folded note in his pocket mean. Buck’s lasagna and Ana’s colour-coded study cards give the tenants enough life that their memories matter for their own sake, too.

This is also a strong pick for anyone hunting the found family and slow-reveal patterns that keep teen readers coming back.

Where Just the Good Parts Gives Ground

• The ending explains itself. The final act is built from guided conversations in which characters ask Caspen what he would tell each of the others, and he answers with the lesson. It is moving, but it is a summary of the book delivered by the book.
• Lars is more device than person. He gets a city, a college and a mother, then spends most of his page time stuck in costumes. The chemistry is charming; the relationship has little room to develop.
• The rules stay loose. How candles, time and who-lit-what fit together is raised often and settled vaguely, which will frustrate readers who like their magic tidy.
• Seasoned readers will see the shape early. Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch plants its clues generously. Younger readers will enjoy the click; adults may wait a while for Caspen to catch up.

Read These Next After Just the Good Parts

If Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch worked for you, these share its mix of loss, tenderness and a world slightly off its axis.

1. They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera for two boys, one day and a premise that makes every small moment count.
2. Love at Second Sight by F.T. Lukens for a queer teen romance with a supernatural gift at its centre.
3. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig for an adult take on stepping into other versions of a life to learn what mattered.
4. The Romantic Tragedies of a Drama King by Harry Trevaldwyn for a lighter, funnier queer coming-of-age story.

About Robbie Couch

Robbie Couch grew up in small-town Michigan and now lives in Los Angeles, and the Crimson of this novel, with its lake views, red maples and downstate tourists, reads like a place he knows well. Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch is his fifth novel, published by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers on 13 October 2026.

• His debut, The Sky Blues, was a Barnes & Noble Young Adult Book of the Year finalist and a Junior Library Guild Selection.
• If I See You Again Tomorrow, his third novel, became a New York Times bestseller.
• That book earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist and the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books.
• His other novels are Blaine for the Win and Another First Chance.

The Verdict

This is a soft, generous novel about a boy who has been curating his father, and its best pages are the ones where the curation fails: a powdered-sugar confession, an empty chair at an exhibition. The magic is loose and the last act talks too much, but the heart of Just the Good Parts by Robbie Couch is sound, and the idea that real affection needs the bad memories too is worth handing to any teenager stuck in the limbo of a loss with no answer.

Light a candle for the people you miss, and let them be the whole of who they were.