Welcome to The Afictionado’s Queer Book Rec Bonanza! It’s Pride Month, and to celebrate, I’ll be breaking my usual blogging schedule to post one review a week for the entirety of June.
Last week’s entry was a historical fantasy. This time we return to the contemporary world, but don’t worry, magic isn‘t too far away…
Premise: Hollis has always been one of the guys, but the number of things she has in common with her childhood-best-friend-turned-boyfriend are dwindling. She wants to connect with him over his beloved tabletop RPG Secrets & Sorcery, but he and his friends have a strict “no girlfriend rule” for their games. After some disastrous, alienating attempts at finding another group to join, Hollis comes across Gloria’s all-girls, queer-friendly game, and figures she might as well roll the dice. What she doesn’t expect, when she sits down at Gloria’s table and sends her paladin on a quest, is that Hollis is setting out on a personal adventure of her own.
Rainbow rep: a plus-sized protagonist figuring out that she’s not straight, a lesbian love interest, a queer ensemble cast including a pansexual girl and a trans girl.
Content considerations: depictions of anxiety attacks; homophobic dialogue from antagonistic characters; discussions of fatphobia and body-shaming; teenaged boys and young dudes being non-dangerously creepy and gross.
Friends are people you like, and who like you in return. This seems self-explanatory, but for many young people it may come as a boggling, life-changing realisation. At the risk of using a macabre metaphor, teenage friendships can sometimes have that “frog in a pot of boiling water” thing going on: it’s actually very uncomfortable in there, but you’ve been sitting submerged for so long (sometimes since childhood) and you’re not primed to notice that your supposed besties are steaming you alive. And even if you do, if that pot has been your safety net and comfort zone for your tumultuous school years, it takes a lot of strength and dexterity to hop out. There’s a romance in The No-Girlfriend Rule, but Christen Randall’s novel is more broadly about the joy and catharsis of finding… let’s stretch this frog symbolism and say a nice, fresh marshland rather than a boiling pot.
Hollis begins the story defined by her complacency. She’s dating her boyfriend, Chris, because they got sick of people suggesting that they hook up, and thought “why not?” By their own admission, it’s a low-effort relationship not too different from their friendship, which in itself started because their surnames both start with B and they kept getting sat next to each other in class. Hollis’ hobbies include sitting quietly and drawing while Chris plays video games, getting coffee with Chris even though she doesn’t really drink it, and awkwardly keeping her head down and her mouth shut while Chris’ crummy dude-friends make casually homophobic and sexist jokes. Sometimes they hold hands, which Hollis thinks is nice, but she’s extremely neutral on the whole kissing thing when it (occasionally) happens.
Hollis wants her hobbies to include Secrets & Sorcery (definitely not Dungeons & Dragons—put that rock down, Wizards of the Coast! Back away!) but the no girlfriend rule leaves her barred from the party and sitting (again) awkwardly at lunch while the boys recount their adventures. Thankfully, the lads excluding Hollis, and Chris shrugging off her earnest attempt to have something in common with him, leads our heroine to a whole new adventuring party. Hollis is wildly uncertain at first—based on how The Lads talk about it, she’s still not entirely sure she even has a place in the game’s culture as a girl, and her instinct is to duck her head and offer to just fill whatever the party needs rather than pursuing her own character ideas. But to her surprise, Gloria’s group is inclusive, caring, and fun. Hollis quickly discovers what it feels like to hang out with people she actually connects with and who actively want to have her in the conversation, and who respect her for who she is and what she’s interested in.
If she’s boggled by this, imagine her bafflement at experiencing honest to goodness romantic attraction to someone—as she starts to with Aini, who plays the party’s cute, golden-hearted bard—rather than simply shrugging her way into a relationship. As I’ve noted before, rom-coms where the protagonist begins the story in a relationship have to walk a fine line where the breakup feels inevitable and good, but the existing partner isn’t cartoonishly awful so you can believe why they got together in the first place. The No-Girlfriend Rule plays out a really interesting, down to earth version of this—Chris is certainly not abusive, nor is he deliberately putting Hollis down. But it’s clear from the get-go that while these two like each other, they’re not good together, and their unromantic romance stems from a desire for comfort and a fear of change. It’s a situation I think is going to be relatable to many young readers, even if they haven’t been in exactly that relationship.
Alas, poor Chris, a coming-of-age story is all about change. The transition towards adulthood sometimes means shedding the connections that defined our childhoods, and acknowledging that people sometimes grow in different directions… and acknowledging that sometimes the people you’ve been spending your time with are kinda shitty and aren’t even truly your friends, in that definition I gave above. It’s not a spoiler to say that Hollis ends up moving on to brighter things, but I won’t give you the details. Hollis’ development and the way she comes out of her shell with the help of her new, actual friends—and with the help of her paladin—is very sweet and rewarding to read. The message of this book, if it has one, is that you deserve to be among people who make you feel like you’re allowed to take up space. You deserve to feel brave, you deserve to be listened to, and you deserve something other than sitting quietly next to your boyfriend’s best bro while he slugs Monster energy drink and makes jokes at your expense. Seriously. Good god.
I have so many feelings about the power of friendship and affirmation in this book that I’ve barely talked about the TTRPG, which is the crux of the story and the vessel through which all this happens! It’s a lot of fun, though. I’m not huge into D&D myself but I still got a kick out of it, and I feel like Randall has tapped into the joy that game uniquely brings for many people. The feeling of tight-knit camaraderie that grows between the players and their characters (including the paladin and the bard, whose in-game flirtation precedes the one between Hollis and Aini), the epic highs and lows of collaborative, chance-based storytelling, and the platform it provides for exploring—or escaping from—your own real-life problems. Plus, the joy of finding really good dice. Clickety clackety.
I read the first chapter of The No-Girlfriend Rule many moons ago, and it hopped to the top of my unofficial list of most-anticipated 2024 books. It’s definitely lived up to my expectations and filled me with the feelings I hoped it would—big feelings about teen friendship, self-worth, and the life-changing power of being a massive nerd.
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