The Feeling Checklist

by Ivy Quinn

For fans of heart-warming coming-of-age YA novels like Counting Down to You by Tashie Bhuiyan and I Hope This Doesn't Find You by Ann Liang.

Hospitals, doctor appointments, daily medicine, repeat. For 17-year-old Hazel, taking care of her sick mother has become her number one priority. But after years of being her mother’s caregiver, Hazel’s own emotions have taken a backseat—now it’s hard for her to feel anything. Overwhelmed, emotionally repressed, and disconnected, Hazel can’t remember the last time she’s felt like a teenager.

Enter River—the new neighbor. River is a social butterfly, and Hazel’s total opposite. However, with his charm, kindness, and willingness to offer a helping hand, Hazel’s cloudy reality begins to brighten. The pair soon find themselves in an unlikely friendship, and River proposes a project to help Hazel work through her unfeeling the Feeling Checklist. Write a list of feelings she wants to experience, and track her progress.

On a personal journey to rediscover herself, Hazel explores the highs and lows of her buried emotions. But in navigating her newfound vulnerability, the risks of falling in love have never been greater.

Genres: Young Adult

312 pages, Paperback

Expected publication January 26, 2027

About the author

By day, Ivy Quinn is a psychology graduate student, but, by night, she writes an assortment of paranormal tales. As a bisexual woman, she's dedicated to healthy representation of women in loving relationships in genre fiction, especially in a post-2016 world and after the purging of queer women from our television screens.

That said, she loves a good romance story or adventure tale no matter the pairing and also writes both male/male stories as well as male/female paranormal romances. She lives by her motto of "Paranormal realms, zero boundaries" and feels that love is love no matter the incarnation. As long as there's a creature that goes bump in the night or a looming apocalypse, she'll write a story about it and with whichever cast of characters she pleases.

Among her favorite books are Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files, Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson series, Carrie Vaughn's Kitty Norville series, Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld, Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, and L. L. Raand's Midnight Hunters series. Before grad school, she had too many favorite TV shows to name, but a lot of the usual suspects are definitely on the list, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer (classics never go out of style), Smallville, Roswell, Supergirl, Wynonna Earp, DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Jessica Jones, Shadowhunters, and Teen Wolf, which she was surprised to see was a fun and totally different take on her all-time favorite film.

Basically, any Stiles is a good Stiles.

As far as non-genre shows go, anything Dan Harmon touches is gold so Ivy can't get enough Community or Rick and Morty, and she's made it a life goal to convert as many people to Rickdom as possible.

She and her girlfriend, Midnight Voss, and her co-writer, Cassie Nova, are currently launching the co-op Sapphic Alliance Fiction to provide a range of lesfic (f/f) centric paranormal romance and urban fantasy tales to the world because everyone deserves a happy ending.