A review of Hollywood, Ending, by John Green. Penguin Random House, 2026, 291 pages.

I was very excited when I finally got my hands on John Green’s newest fiction novel, Hollywood, Ending. Not to mention it was also a signed copy! Green has not published a fiction novel since Turtles All the Way Down in 2017, and he is best known for his fictional works. In Hollywood, Ending Green takes on more serious themes when compared to his previous works; this is his first work that was sold as an adult novel. The story follows Juniper and Kai as they both navigate fame in Hollywood. Juniper has been an actress since she was a child and the movie that they both work on is Kai’s first gig.

I’ve read Green’s work before this newest edition and liked his writing, characters, and nuance. All of that is once again present here. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there were four parts to Hollywood, Ending. Parts one and four are in Juniper’s POV while parts two and three are in Kai’s. Sometimes a dual POV can backfire and make the story difficult to follow, but here I think it added so much depth to both characters and their backstories.

When I started the book, I just knew the character’s names and had a vague understanding that Hollywood was the setting, but this book had an unexpected devastation that I was unprepared for. Early on I understood that something happened to Kai and he didn’t like to talk about it. I soon put it together through “hints” that Kai was molested by an English teacher when he was in high school. He still struggles with it, and on the outside, he seems like a great guy that has the world at his feet… but all the money in the world can’t buy happiness.

Green does an excellent job explaining how this event might affect a survivor even after it’s over, but it never leaves them:

“The hardest thing in life is to be small, to not have any say over what happened to you or who does it. To be at other people’s mercy. I required mercy. I always would. And I hated that. You couldn’t get out in front of that, not ever. You can’t put that behind you. I was twenty-one years old and he was dead and he still had his goddamned hands all over me.”

This passage was when I realized this book was going to be more serious than I had anticipated. That last line punched me in the gut. The feeling Kai describes is mentioned by survivors constantly, and we can tell that Kai hasn’t healed from this traumatic experience years later. I appreciated the male representation in media with Kai. More often than not, authors will use their female lead for this plot arc, but these horrific acts are done to young boys as well. Someone will read this and not feel alone.

I enjoyed Kai’s POV more than Juniper’s. Juniper’s POV did help me understand her better, but Kai just brought so much more to the table for me while he was adapting to his new fame and trying to work through his past. Kai was funny and intriguing, while Juniper was preparing for her day on set or talking with her manager. Juniper did have a complicated relationship with her mom who passed away before the timeline of the book. Juniper has her mom to thank for her fame and money as she got her into acting when she was just a child, but her mother didn’t offer more than that. A small part of me was bummed when I got to part four and it returned to Juniper, which can be another downfall of switching POVs. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her character, I just enjoyed Kai so much more and liked to know what he was feeling and thinking. Juniper didn’t offer these in the same depth as Kai.

Throughout the book, there are moments where I wondered if Kai was depressed because of the way he would describe his feelings. They felt melancholy and slightly concerning, “I often feel kind of empty—not necessarily in a bad way, just like my body is uninhabited. It was windy, but the air that blew in the trees seemed to not have a temperature, which only increased that weird feeling that my body wasn’t really there, or I wasn’t really in it.”

By the end of the book, Kai is spiraling after a secret of his is leaked to the world. Juniper, being the amazing friend that she is, does her best to get through to him so that they can work on their movie together. It was a touching few chapters, where you could feel how scared and confused she was. She knew what had happened to Kai but didn’t have a lot of details, but she continued to give him the space that he needed to figure things out. She would be there when he was ready to go home. After they return there is an amazing passage that tickled my brain as it was connected the Emily Dickenson’s “I cannot live with You” which is referred earlier in the book.

“The miracle of love is that Kai loved the Juniper he met in that Pittsburgh hotel, and he also loved this me. The miracle of love is that yes, I am here and you are there, but the door is ajar. We get through that door with empathy, with imagining, with acting. We play our way through it with music ad dance and art. We break the door with love. We love others until they can love themselves, until we can love ourselves. And all along the way, the future remains yours, ineluctably and irrevocably. You can cling to that future, as long as you need to, until with work and with time the future becomes present and the present past. You survive, and you survive, until one day, you survived.”

I’ve thought about Green’s choice for the title for this book since its announcement back in March. The biggest thing for me was the comma in the title, which broke up the words. Going into the book, Hollywood seems like this dream world where everything comes true and you can live the best life. However, after completing the book, I think that Kai and Juniper navigate through her new stardom and can see the cracks within Hollywood. Hollywood might be a destination but it is also a business. Their naive take on a dream is ending over the course of Hollywood, Ending.

Copy-Edited by Carter L. Myers