Your Love is Not Good, Johanna Hedva
Your Love is Not Good, Johanna Hedva
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Your Love is Not Good

Author: Johanna Hedva

Narrator: Johanna Hedva

Unabridged: 10 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/28/2025


Synopsis

At a party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the center of everyone's attention. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. She will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model.

When the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist's first sold-out show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their work, and her seduction. But a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices.

Torn between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and disorienting, unwilling to cut loose any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all.

Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.

Contains mature themes.

About Johanna Hedva

Johanna Hedva (they/them)is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches and now lives in LA and Berlin. They are the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good and On Hell, and the collection of poetry, performances, and essays, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain. Their artwork has been shown internationally, and their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and The Moon.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul on February 02, 2024

Longlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize US & Canada I stumbled away. I imagined what we must look like, two women locked together, one shrieking, beseeching, one flailing, refusing, mother and daughter, enemies, strangers, artist and muse. I started to run up the stairs, not looking b......more

Goodreads review by Lucy on August 02, 2023

The unnamed main character gradually shifts from a pathetic lump with major self worth issues into what she thinks might be confidence but is actually self-centred petty-tyrant behaviour, going from obsessing over how perfect her lovers are to deliberately ignoring the boundaries of her partners, pu......more

Goodreads review by Grace on October 13, 2023

What!! This was a queer fever dream that I couldn’t put down. So compulsive and strange in the best way. The commentary on whiteness and art was great, it reminded me of what “Yellowface” promised but didn’t deliver. As someone who is queer, half Asian and half white, from southern CA, spent a heart......more

Goodreads review by Iris on July 08, 2023

Epically beautiful, smart, and cool. I loved being in the head of a successful yet still struggling artist, surrounded by an industry of people that want something from her, and artist peers that try to control her actions. There's a entrancing rebellious spirit to this book. The commentary is powerf......more

Goodreads review by geo on January 13, 2025

2.8 i have read too many lit fics that are intentionally disjointed, erratic, hazy, etc. to demonstrate the narrator’s mounting instability/unreliability and am a bit tired of how predictable this specific genre of unpredictability is. obviously that is a commentary on my own reading habits more tha......more