Christen Randall
Christen Randall (she/they) is a queer, fat, neurodiverse author of queer, fat, neurodiverse books. When they’re not writing joyful stories for the next generation of geeky gay kids, you can find them working at their local library branch or at home planning all the D&D campaigns they’ll run one day, they swear. Christen lives in Covington, Kentucky. The No-Girlfriend Rule is her debut novel.
THE NO-GIRLFRIEND RULE
Seventeen-year-old Hollis Beckwith fears there’s no place for a fat girl with anxiety in tabletop gaming—and that she’s destined to be a non-player character, not the hero, in her own life story.
Between her apathetic boyfriend’s ‘No Girlfriends at the Table’ rule and a humiliating half-session at her local game store, Hollis is close to giving up on Secrets & Sorcery for good. Then a flyer advertising an all-girls game catches her eye, and Hollis rolls the dice and reaches out to the mysterious ‘Gloriawith12os’. Against every better judgement, Hollis and her paladin character, Honoria, join the party on an epic quest in the Eight Realms. Crowded around an oak-finish table in Gloria’s cosy Ohio apartment, the girls battle twisted magic, cursed boyfriends and the ominous ‘Big Bad’whilst sharing cupcakes, playlists and their real-world problems.
With Honoria as armor, Hollis starts to believe she can be more than just fat, anxious and a little bit lost. But an in-game crush between paladin Honoria and the party’s bard, played by cool, charismatic Aini, threatens to spills over into the real world, and suddenly playing pretend isn’t enough.