Jennifer Yeh‘s debut novel, Creatures of Habit, follows Gina Lee on the day of her ex-husband’s engagement party, as the life she once imagined gives way to an uncertain future. When an amphibious stranger crawls through her window asking for help, an unexpected friendship begins to reshape her understanding of loss, possibility, and what comes after the life you thought you were meant to have. Told over the course of a single day, the novel explores reinvention, grief, and the quiet courage required to begin again.
The novel will be published on March 2, 2027, by William Morrow and is available for preorder now.
Before writing her debut novel, Jennifer Yeh earned a Ph.D. in integrative biology and worked as a frog biologist after studying science and creative writing at Harvard College. Her fiction has appeared in Analecta and Embark. She was a 2021–2022 BookEnds Fellow at Stony Brook University, and she also writes science and evolution textbooks. She lives in San Francisco with her family and rescue dog, Cumulus.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Creatures of Habit, designed by Paul Miele-Herndon with artwork by Dan Bransfield, along with a Q&A with Yeh about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
Creatures of Habit is about a woman who meets a mysterious amphibious frogman on the difficult day of her ex’s engagement party. Given the premise of the story, I knew I wanted the amphibious man to be on the cover in some way. I did have the fleeting thought—while writing a scene where the main character, Gina, pictures the amphibious man in a field of orange poppies—that that might make a nice cover image.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
The cover design process actually began when we settled on the title for the book. The novel’s original title was Migratory Creatures, which I already knew was problematic because people kept asking me if the book was about birds! My amazing editor at William Morrow, Tessa James, came up with the new title Creatures of Habit and also said that she could imagine the cover showing an open window with a frog foot flying by. (Gina meets the amphibious man when he climbs in her kitchen window.) I loved that idea immediately, especially the ironic contrast between the title Creatures of Habit, which suggests humdrum comfort and familiarity, and the surprise of the frog foot. I still tried to brainstorm other ideas and collected various comp covers, but when my editor, agent, and I met to discuss the cover, the window + flying frog foot was a clear favorite.
A few weeks later, Tessa passed along two black-and-white cover drafts from the design team, Paul Miele-Herndon (cover designer) and Dan Bransfield (cover artist). The first was their version of the window + frog foot idea. It showed a woman’s hand on a window frame, pulling the window open, and a mottled frog hand on the sill, preparing to climb in. The second cover showed a woman’s hand clasping a frog hand. This one was intriguing because, while it also had that element of surprise and contrast with the title, it also suggested an intimacy between the two characters and hints at their love story. I also liked that it had more of a focal point for the eye to latch onto. Tessa mentioned that there was a lot of excitement in-house for the clasped hands, and I also got enthusiastic responses from the writers, friends, and family that I showed it to. So, it was a pretty easy decision to go forward with the clasped hands.
After that, we received the color version of the cover, and it was a stunner. Then, there was one final round of minor edits mostly involving adjusting the font.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
It was thrilling! When your novel has existed only as a text file for so many years, it’s almost shocking to see it begin to take form as a book. And though I’d already seen a black-and-white version of the cover, I was blown away by the bright green frog hand and purple background, the bold red polish on Gina’s nails, and the slightly curvy letters of the somehow perfectly creaturely font.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The clasped hands tell us that this is a story about a woman and a mysterious green creature, emphasizing that their relationship will be both strange and intimate. The cover also hints at the love story to come.