Name: Your Love Is Not Good
Rating: 2.75 (4 reviews)
ISBN: 9781913505660

Johanna Hedva

Your Love Is Not Good

taylor miles hopkins

 I envíed him with hostility, that not only the world but someone, a parent, a god, a quote-unquote cívilízatíon, had let hím define hímself on hís own terms.

“Then I realized that I only wanted to save it because it was beautiful…That’s the reason a thing should live or die? No. So—I let it die.” 

“Power is not an object you can take or give." "But I am an object. And I only made a world of more objects. I failed." "Power ís ín the space between objects he went on. "It’s the thing that makes us objects.”

An artist of color becomes obsessed with a white model in a novel with the glamor of Clarice Lispector and the viscerality of Han Kang.

At an otherwise forgettable 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. Haunted into adulthood by her Korean father’s abandonment of his family, as well as the specter of her beguiling, abusive white mother, the painter finds herself caught in a perfect trap. 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. Since she’s an artist, she will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model. As for Hanne, what does she want? Her whiteness seems sometimes as cruel as a new sheet of paper.

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, just when the painter is on the verge of her long sought-after breakthrough, a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in the art community, 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. Is it any wonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bit exciting to think she could too?

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.

Your Love is Not Good

throughout this book, i had the strange sense i was missing something. i was a bit apprehensive when i saw the similarities in the author bio and the character description, because i often feel to walk away with any judgement towards a character becomes a questionable blurry line of judgement towards a writer themselves.

i found the way this tackled whiteness perpetual and engaging - which is a feat in itself. i don't tend to have much sympathy for the 'caught between two worlds' mixed race monologue, but this one i think tackled it differently, which is to say it tackles it through the universal wound - the mother. 

in the end, i find the title especially fitting. this is a story about a love that is not good, but a love nonetheless. does bad love make a bad person? is there any way to undo it? is whiteness something truly intangible, even when attached to the mother? at one point does the emphasis on otherness only reinforce whiteness? it's an abundance of questions and a deficit of answers that leaves you digging and digging and eventually, gaping.

tiff <3

throughout this book, i had the strange sense i was missing something. i was a bit apprehensive when i saw the similarities in the author bio and the character description, because i often feel to walk away with any judgement towards a character becomes a questionable blurry line of judgement towards a writer themselves.

i found the way this tackled whiteness perpetual and engaging - which is a feat in itself. i don't tend to have much sympathy for the 'caught between two worlds' mixed race monologue, but this one i think tackled it differently, which is to say it tackles it through the universal wound - the mother. 

in the end, i find the title especially fitting. this is a story about a love that is not good, but a love nonetheless. does bad love make a bad person? is there any way to undo it? is whiteness something truly intangible, even when attached to the mother? at one point does the emphasis on otherness only reinforce whiteness? it's an abundance of questions and a deficit of answers that leaves you digging and digging and eventually, gaping.

Your Love Is Not Good

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