Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A relationship between young screen actors is magical, fraught, and relentlessly public in Green’s first novel for adults. “Every movie romance needs an Obstacle, a reason the characters don’t naturally fall into each other.” In the off-screen romance between actors Juniper Castillo and Kai Laramie, the obstacle is a moving target. Juniper notices early on that as flirty and forward as Kai is, he seems “closed off to a romantic connection”; that turns out to be the tip of a very problematic iceberg. The two meet in the lobby of a Pittsburgh hotel where they will be spending the evening with Matthew Malone, the megastar playing Andy Warhol in a movie they’re about to begin shooting,Andy Warhol Never Gets Old. Kai has been cast as Andy’s intern, Juniper as a journalist who gets in over her head. This is Juniper’s first adult role after a long run as a Nickelodeon child star, and newcomer Kai’s first role of any kind. Green evokes in compelling detail all the phases and aspects of the film project, from the table read to the screening of the rough cut, from the social media fanfare to the public premiere and the press junket, moving back and forth between Juniper’s and Kai’s first-person perspectives. In a meeting with one of the ubiquitous publicists, Kai learns that somehow “the high school stuff” he never talks about—despite their growing inseparability and seemingly profound connection, he hasn’t even brought himself to share it with Juniper—has surfaced. Details emerge slowly, then blow up in the media; the book’s third act focuses on the destructive potential of celebrity culture in a climate that makes Warhol’s milieu look innocent by comparison. After a long break from writing fiction—his last two books wereEverything Is Tuberculosis (2025) andThe Anthropocene Reviewed (2021)—Green fills this novel with carefully observed details of Hollywood culture and characters, including running jokes about vegan cuisine, media training, and the way Kai’s agent constantly and boorishly consults his young female assistant on points of political correctness. Can he talk about “hot girls”? Can he quote T.S. Eliot? OK to say “dog vomit”? A classic Green portrait of young love…but here the fault is in our social media. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

A YA-fiction supernova, Green began writing for adults with two works of nonfiction, The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021) and Everything is Tuberculosis (2025). He now presents his first novel for grown-ups and his first novel since Turtles All the Way Down (2017), an enthralling tale aglow with all the traits his steadfast fans adore but deepened by more complex predicaments, inquiries, and insights. Drawing on his own experiences with the boons and boondoggles of fame and the demands and thrills of having most of his novels adapted for the screen, Green portrays two twentysomething actors on the brink of movie stardom or psychological crises or both. Juniper Castillo and Kai Laramie—opposites in some ways, kindred spirits in others—are cast in an unusually thoughtful film, Andy Warhol Never Gets Old. Superstar Matthew Malone has the lead, and he takes his young costars under his wing, happy to be seen as a generous mentor.Juniper has been performing all her life, propelled and mistreated by her alcoholic mother who has recently died. Brilliant, disciplined, and ambitious, Juniper knows filmmaking inside and out, is adept at social media self-promotion, and accepts the entire exhausting, frequently absurd, sometimes downright grotesque publicity game even as she steadfastly pursues artistic integrity and excellence. Newbie Kai is stunned and horrified by Hollywood’s coldly calculated machinations. He is also severely traumatized and can't bring himself to tell Juniper why even as they start to fall in love. But no secret, no matter how dark and painful, is safe from the voracious movie-industrial-complex which will do nearly anything for clickbait in pursuit of box-office gold.Green’s storytelling is astute, empathic, and magnetizing as Juniper and Kai take turns narrating. Reflections on Warhol’s profound grasp and exploitation of the vicissitudes of celebrity and the commodification of art and life shape the novel's provocative and suspenseful conflicts. Green, who thanks his art scholar and curator wife, Sarah, for her input, also works in tributes to painters Joan Mitchell and Agnes Martin. Among the other wise and touching assertions seeded throughout this intellectually keen and warmhearted tale is Kai’s recounting of how, while he was growing up in Indiana (where Green lives), his Hamlet-quoting grandfather told him: “You’ll never be alone in this world so long as you have a library card.” In sum, Green’s novel of betrayal and survival, trust and love is a fluent condemnation of the “soul-destroying” machine of commercialization and a paean to art. Kai says movies “let people feel things together.” Juniper muses, “Movies can give us a window into a deeper self, that way-down place that hurts so bad we can only glimpse it in fragments.” This is also what novels do, as Green so movingly demonstrates in this spellbinding, tender, incisive, funny, and compassionate story of love and creativity.