I’m DNF-ing this book, and since I read 55% I’m counting it as read (my rule is if I read half I gave the book a fair chance). This is one of those books where things happen, but there’s no plot/direction. I didn’t feel attached to any of the characters. I don’t know much about the author, but the novel read like it was written by a poet, and I don’t like novels written by poets. I enjoyed the perspective of the person who ran away more than the one who’s drowning in comphet (or maybe it’s actual bisexuality? Idk). I’m a lesbian, I don’t care about how much you love (?) your husband. For the longest time I thought the two characters were alternate realities for the same person, but apparently that’s not the case.
I recommend this to readers who like no plot just vibes books. Personally I needed more substance.

"And I saw new heavens and a new earth"

After reading this beautiful mix of poetry & prose, I truly feel that my words cannot do justice to how breathtaking this novel is. In A Language of Limbs, we are immersed in the stories of 2 queer women, living drastically different lives, but as these stories progress, their symmetry starts to unfold and their lives converge. Hardcastle writes of young queer yearning & the heartbreak of being unloved by those who you thought were family, but also of queer joy as resistance & the euphoria of finding our own skin. As the story is set during the height of the AIDS epidemic, I definitely recommend checking the trigger warnings. Not even halfway through 2025 and I am confident in saying this will be a favorite for the year.

Thank you Penguin Group Dutton & NetGalley for the ARC! I am already ecstatic at the thought of purchasing a physical copy of my own and doing a re-read. I LOVE BEING GAY!!!!!!

This novel is both breathtaking and devastating, wrapped up in eloquent and poetic prose. I enjoyed reading this so much.. The characters are complicated and you can't help but love and care about their plight. The struggles faced by the young, queer community and the two young teens in this novel was both heartbreaking and eye opening. This is a novel I will definitely revisit in the future.

This was such a joyful read. I enjoyed this so much. I typically don't go for the will-they-won't-they won't they tropes, but this one was done perfectly. This novel had me laughing and crying, and smiling. I recommend this as your next read.

A solid queer coming of age that I’m sure many will enjoy but I never connected with it. My mistake was not heeding that obviously a book with a title as poetic as “A Language of Limbs” would be written in the same dreamy prose. I have a real intolerance to sentimentality and wistful metaphorical writing, it tends to leave me at arm’s length and I don’t connect with the characters as much as I like to when it's more about the atmosphere than the interiority. That’s what happened here. Gave it to 50% for it to grip me and it never did. Only ended up finishing it because it was an ARC. Switched to listening on audio and the narrators’ whispery and breathless voices only made the dreamy tone worse lol.

While this was not my usual prose or style, it was an elegantly written book. The perspective tenses were unconventional in the best way and I think many people could appreciate the beauty of it.

I really loved "A Language of Limbs" by Dylin Hardcastle. Tender and poignant at times. Loved the innovative limb 1 and limb 2 structure. Great character development. Recommended.

It will be many moons before I’m able to articulate my feelings for this love story. From the first page until the last, I was completely immersed in the narrative, lost within the pages, and pondering it at work. I am in utter awe of Dylin Hardcastle‘s prose and vivid storytelling.

I highly recommend A Language of Limbs, it is a visceral and poignant experience that you will feel in your core.

This life-affirming story will be a top read of 2025 for me!

Stunning. I cried my eyes out during the last chapter. I had such a specific interpretation of the concept of the book that the ending worked like a twist and it absolutely floored me. The entire book I was thinking about the choices you make and the roads those choices lead you down and how they change you, but how sometimes you stay the same and wind up in the same place, and you can’t protect yourself from grief or loss or pain, but you’ve also never gone so far you can’t find joy again, and to know all that but then also find out someone else was experiencing that same grief and joy and is almost like your mirror through the years of your life you thought you were alone or didn’t know if you could love again? God. I’m so fucking emotional. I love this book. We’re all going to be okay!

I was hooked from the beginning!
It was amazing and engaging.
I was instantly sucked in by the atmosphere and writing style.
The characters were all very well developed .
The writing is exceptional and I was hooked after the first sentence.

I haven’t read a book this powerfully heartbreaking in a while. It’s a quick story, but it’s written with so much depth and meaning that you feel what the characters are feeling.

This story follows a woman living two parallel lives. In one, she embraces her identity as a lesbian; in the other, she suppresses those feelings and remains in a heterosexual relationship. Her emotional experiences in both lives are explored, with moments where the two realities intersect. The narrative delves into themes surrounding sexuality, identity, and personal struggle, and also touches on sensitive topics that may be triggering for some readers.

*I received a copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for this opportunity*

A LANGUAGE OF LIMBS is a lyrical love story to the queer and indigenous peoples of 1970s and 80s Australia. It is weighed down with symbolism and sentimentality, the chapters often more poetry than prose, but within those verses is a story about two queer women trying to find their path.

I, like some others it seems, didn't realize it was two different narrators, the voices are incredibly similar-- but I enjoyed the book as a parallel lives story, and was pleasantly surprised by the ending. I think read either way, this is a powerful story of what-ifs and the teeming possibility of decision; the intersectionality of all our lives and the unknown impact we have on the people within our circle.

This is an absolutely gorgeously written tale about two queer Australian women who handle their sexuality in different ways. I was impressed by the depth of the storytelling, and I liked how the POVs were split by limbs.

So much packed into 289 pages, this book delivers an honest, unflinching look at both the good and the bad. It's raw, real, and beautifully told from start to finish. This book is for everyone.

Wow, what a book to kick off Pride Month with!

This is such a beautiful read—so poetic, so lyrical. It’s sad and tragic while also being joyful and hopeful. I wanted to read it slowly to savor the language, but I also wanted to devour it, letting the short chapters form a sort of montage in my mind, picking up the pace the closer these two characters got to finding each other.

I loved how the main characters’ lives paralleled each other in so many ways while still remaining distinct. I enjoyed the repetition of certain phrases for both characters, which highlighted the similarities in their needs and desires. It was incredibly well done and made their naming as “limb one” and “limb two” throughout the majority of the story feel that much more fitting. I was so eager for their paths to cross that it was hard for me to put this book down once I started reading. I absolutely loved that we got their names at the very end—I hoped the author was saving that for the perfect moment, and they did. It made such an impact.

Beyond the stories of the two main characters, I also really loved the diverse array of side characters. You can truly feel the love the author has for these communities in how they handled these characters and their stories with such care.

I had tears in my eyes consistently for the last 100 pages or so. This is one of those books that left me feeling quiet and still once I finished.

I’m genuinely in awe of the writing and artistry that went into creating this story; it feels like so much more than a novel. I cannot recommend this enough—it’s an absolute must-read.

This is the first book in a long time that left me in tears by the final pages. A Language of Limbs is poetic and an amazing story about queer identity, grief, love, and the many shapes a community can take.

I loved the undercurrent of suspense—those near-misses and almost-encounters between little Dave and Suzanne kept me invested. I wasn’t sure if or how their paths would intersect again, and that anticipation made the story feel both intimate and expansive.

That said, the alternating POVs labeled only as “limbs one” and “limbs two” did get a little confusing. I often had to remind myself whose perspective I was in, and I found myself wishing the characters' names had been used more clearly to anchor me in their worlds. Still, that didn’t take away from the emotional impact or the lyrical beauty of the writing

This book wasn't for me. And honestly this is on me because I knew it wasn't my vibe!

I have zero appreciation for poetry and this book starts out with poetry and features poetry pretty prominently. I think a lot of people will enjoy the writing style, but it wasn't for me. I didn't really understand why quotations weren't used at all during the book. Again, I am sure this will not bother a lot of people, it just wasn't my cup of tea.

Also, I hate depressing books and oh my dear god was this book depressing. Literally you think "this cannot possibly get more depressing," and then someone else dies. Please read trigger warnings closely because something toward end of book caught me off guard and had me crying like a baby.

I think this book will appeal to a lot of people, it just was not my style!

A Language of Limbs is a tricky one to review—it’s a novel that I really loved in places, but really struggled with in others. Despite its flaws (or, more accurately, things that didn’t mesh with my personal tastes), the novel is a wonderful depiction of queer love, joy, and resilience with a very thoroughly researched representation of Australia’s queer history. I can easily see Hardcastle becoming a prominent voice in the contemporary queer & lesbian literary scene, and it will be well-deserved.

The novel is told in alternating perspectives—limbs one and two—with each following a (mostly) nameless woman as she grows into her sexuality and experiences the shifting dynamics of queer representation and politics in the last decades of the twentieth century. Hardcastle tackles several topics and ideas through these characters, and is mostly successful in doing so. Limbs one and two each have their own relationship to education as an institution, to religion, to unloving blood relatives and loving chosen families, to compulsive heterosexuality, and to queer culture and history. But where things stumble just a touch is Hardcastle’s integration of Aboriginal representation; comments that were made regarding Australia’s long and dark history of robbing Indigenous peoples of their land and their children stick out like a sore thumb—a necessary topic to cover, but one that reads like a checklist of political talking points rather than a carefully integrated element of the novel.

Hardcastle’s writing is generally very strong—descriptive where it needs to be, emotional without being overwritten, and propulsive. The interplay between limbs one and two allowed the novel to just fly by, and I found the book difficult to put down—just one more cycle through these characters’ lives, please! But Hardcastle wrote this novel as part of their PhD work, and it does show in a sort of Iowa-writer’s-workshop way, iykwim. I don’t know how to say this delicately, but the poetry woven throughout the novel was not good, and said poetry being good was somewhat integral to events in the novel. I also found certain sections of the book to play a little bit into the phenomenon of queer fiction being just so incredibly sad and traumatic. If something heartbreaking can happen to these characters, it does, often very explicitly. And while there are necessary reasons for some of this—the devastation of the AIDS crisis, for example—it just feels like a LOT crammed into 200 pages.

But I am overall very happy to have read this novel, as it put a promising author onto my radar and allowed me to learn so much about Australia’s own queer history and culture. An emotionally difficult novel at times, but one that is perfect for an introspective Sunday afternoon.

Thank you to the publisher for an e-ARC of this novel in exchange for my honest review.

Just found a new favorite book.

I am in awe of this raw, romantic, devastating, and disorienting read. I’ve really never read something written in this way. In this book we follow two limbs, or two POVs where one girl chooses to embrace her sexuality, starting with admitting her love to her childhood best friend, and one where the girl chooses to suppress those feelings. We watch as these two story lines oppose and intersect each other, weaving us through Australia and the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s.

This book is so raw and rips your heart right out of your body. In limb 1, we follow the girl who chose to come out, her found queer family, and her finding the love of her life. In limb 2, we follow the girl who chose to suppress her feelings, deciding to be with men, and how she is constantly haunted by what never was when trying to find contentment with her choice to stay closeted.

In both story lines we see girls devastated by love, by family resentments, trying to grow as individual people outside of their identities. But in opposition in both storylines, we see the difference in how they are treated by police, by the establishment, and how differently their communities are affected by AIDS.

The writing is poetic, gentle, and haunting. It’ll float around dreamily and then confront you head on with some of the rawest descriptions of grief and loss. I do not have enough words to describe my love of this book and I can’t wait to reread it.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the ARC!

6 stars.