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 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.

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.

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Christen Randall (she/they) grew up in the American South as one of those girls–the sort that stick out for being too fat or too poor, for being a “slow reader” or a loud mouth, for being, you know, a little funny or a little too sensitive. And like those girls do, she learned it was much easier to exist in this world with a story on her side. For lack of reflection of herself in the ones she read, she started writing her own.

Now, Christen writes Young Adult fiction that centers queer, fat, geeky kids. Her work is about classism, counter culture, mental illness and disability, queer identity, music as a love language, and cats without being about those things. On her good days, you can find Tennessee Williams and Rainbow Rowell in her words. On the bad ones, you’ll find a lot of cussing. These things, as they say, happen.

At present, they live as an Almost Midwesterner in Covington, Kentucky, in a second floor apartment all their own. There are house plants in their windows and shelves full of books and unpainted D&D miniatures in their office. Maybe one day soon, Christen will get a cat.