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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.