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The No-Girlfriend Rule
Additional information
| Author | Christen Randall |
|---|---|
| Genre | YA – Contemporary |
| Release Date | March 5, 2024 |
| Publisher | Atheneum |
| Tags | Queer |
Description
Julie Murphy meets Casey McQuiston in this unforgettable queer romance about a teen girl whose foray into fantasy tabletop roleplaying brings her new confidence, true friends, and a shot at real, swoon-worthy love.
Hollis Beckwith isn’t trying to get a girl—she’s just trying to get by. For a fat, broke girl with anxiety, the start of senior year brings enough to worry about. And besides, she already has a boyfriend: Chris. Their relationship isn’t particularly exciting, but it’s comfortable and familiar, and Hollis wants it to survive beyond senior year. To prove she’s a girlfriend worth keeping, Hollis decides to learn Chris’s favorite tabletop roleplaying game, Secrets & Sorcery—but his unfortunate “No Girlfriends at the Table” rule means she’ll need to find her own group if she wants in.
Enter: Gloria Castañeda and her all-girls game of S&S! Crowded at the table in Gloria’s cozy Ohio apartment, the six girls battle twisted magic in-game and become fast friends outside it. With her character as armor, Hollis starts to believe that maybe she can be more than just fat, anxious, and a little lost.
But then an in-game crush develops between Hollis’s character and the bard played by charismatic Aini Amin-Shaw, whose wide, cocky grin makes Hollis’s stomach flutter. As their gentle flirting sparks into something deeper, Hollis is no longer sure what she wants…or if she’s content to just play pretend.
About the Author
C
hristen Randall (she/they) draws on her experience growing up fat, queer, and neurodiverse in the American South to write the books she never had for the next generation of kids who need them. Their work is about geek culture, fat acceptance, mental illness and disability, queer identity, classism, music as a love language, and cats without being about those things.
She studied English at Middle Tennessee State University. In 2021, she was selected as an inaugural mentee of The Write Team Mentorship Program. Since then, they have centered community in their authorship, volunteering with such organizations as Diverse Voices, Inc., We Need Diverse Books, and NaNoWriMo.
Christen lives in Covington, Kentucky by way of Nashville, Tennessee with too many books and not quite enough shelves. They can most often be found bopping around town playing Pokémon Go and getting coffee, starting craft projects they may or may not ever finish, and at the gaming table roleplaying as bratty rogues or spooky wizards. Find her online on most socials @bycrandall. The No-Girlfriend Rule is her debut novel.
