This is a beautifully written, poetic story about teenagers in Australia and how their lives intersect. I felt the story was moving, but the writing was a bit overdone at certain times. Overall I enjoyed it.

A poetic look at the lives of two women who take two different paths in life, but are forever linked by their first brush with love. This is a queer coming of age story set against the backdrop of the burgeoning gay rights movement in Australia and the start of the AIDS crisis.

This is a very well written book with a great story to tell. The main characters are both equally fleshed out and whose stories are given equal attention. The historical backdrop of the story was intriguing and informative. I know very little of the gay rights movement, so it was interesting learning about the movement in other parts of the world.

This is a compelling queer read that reflects the ties that bind us all.

There was a point while reading this novel where I almost gave up on it because I felt I was not getting it. But, I kept reading and it turned into one of the most beautiful examples of how the use of language can just turn your emotions into a rollercoaster.

Read this!

An absolutely gorgeous book following two different representations of queer life in Australia starting in the early 1970s. In one limb of the story a teenage girl is caught by her parents while she’s hooking up with her best friend. After being cast out of her home she makes her way to Sydney where she meets a community of other queer people. In the other limb of the story a teen girl squashes down her feelings for her best friend and never acts on them. She ends up in Sydney to attend university, but always stays on the outside protests and progress that’s going on.

This book is full of so much queer joy as well as pain. It’s so great getting to see the vibrant community and how they work to protect one another and fight for change. But then it’s also devastating to read as the book goes through the 80s and AIDS starts wiping out the community. I loved hearing about the art that the different characters were making and how they were translating their experiences into paintings, poetry, and more.

Dylin Hardcastle’s writing really brought this story to life. I felt like it was rich and descriptive without ever feeling overwritten. The symmetry that was used between the two limbs of the story added a lot to the reading experience.

I definitely recommend checking this book out if you enjoy stories about queer history, coming of age, and beautiful writing.

Set in 1970s Australia, the book follows August through two diverging lives: one where she embraces her queerness and finds solace in a queer commune in Sydney, and another where she pushes her desires aside and heads to university, pretending everything's fine. It's like watching two versions of yourself play out in parallel, and the pain comes from knowing that each choice means leaving something behind.

Hardcastle's prose is hauntingly beautiful, a thick, golden web that draws you in and leaves you tangled in the spaces between the lines. The characters are so vivid, their love so tender, their regrets so palpable - it's like reading the softest, most heartbreaking love letter, except it's written not with ink, but with memories and the raw vulnerability of a body that cannot lie.

This novel moves through pivotal moments - protests, hospital rooms, and the crushing weight of the AIDS crisis - where the physical and emotional distance between the two Augusts grows and shrinks in heartbreaking synchrony. By the end, you're left not just with a love story, but with a stark reminder: how often do we miss the people, the choices, the love we were meant to have because we didn't have the courage to make a different choice?

Again, a huge thank you to Dutton for the advanced digital copy - this novel is an elegy, a reminder of the joy and the grief that can coexist in every decision we make. It's tender, visceral, and quietly devastating.

Definitely 5/5 limbs...errr...stars (and a lot of tears, and I mean a lot)

Thank you so much for giving the opportunity to read this special and incredible story early.

Enchanting, engrossing, and deeply moving, this is a love story for the ages and I’m so grateful to have been able to experience it. I will be pushing this incredible story on everyone I know, because I know I wish I could read it again for the first time.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this book early! This was a very moving and tender read that I thoroughly enjoyed and would recommend to friends!

Thank you to Dutton and NetGalley for the chance to read an early copy of this book!

4.5 stars rounded down

After finishing, I have SO many conflicted feelings! First of all, this is an excellent queer love story and coming of age novel that is both heartbreaking and beautiful. The book has a unique structure, with two parallel storylines running alongside each other in alternating chapters. The “limb one” story starts after a young girl is discovered kissing her best friend by her parents and an act of violence forces her out of her home. This storyline focuses on queer joy, pain, and resistance, as she builds a new found family within the LGBTQ+ community and enters a passionate relationship with a woman, set amidst the HIV/AIDS epidemic in 70s/80s Australia.

The “limb two” storyline follows a much more “traditional” path, as the main character pushes down her early desire for her best friend, goes to university, and enters a long-term relationship with a man. While this storyline follows a quieter path, it’s still infused with grief and pain, but in a different way.

The prose of this book is beautiful, raw, and visceral (if a bit heavy-handed at times), and these two storylines are effortlessly woven together to build tension.

What I’m struggling with, though, is the fact that I only realized these storylines were about different people at the very end of the book. The whole time, I was envisioning a sliding doors situation, where the impact of one decision sent one girl’s life in two different directions. I imagined these two storylines as the same character, but if she had made different decisions. After reading some reviews, I’m not the only reader who thought that, but I still ended up feeling like I read the book wrong by the end of it.

Newcastle, Australia, 1972. On a sticky summer night, a choice must be made: To give in to queer desire or suppress it? To venture into the unknown or stay the course? In alternating chapters, we follow Limb One and Limb Two, as one person’s life branches off in surprising and unavoidable ways.
Parts of this were very effecting, particularly when dealing with grief and loss. The parallel timelines echoed both This is How You Lose the Time War and lighter rom-com fare, but succumbs to the risk that all “multi-verse” stories do, which is that one story grabs you by the throat while the other one just exists.
I think I’ll be in the minority here, in that “Limb Two” was the storyline I couldn’t shake off, whereas “Limb One,” tries to tackle SO much with the AIDS crises, art exhibitions, and near-constant poetry, that it became more of writing showcase than something that connected with me. But, “Limb Two’s” quiet family life and the devastation found in unlikely places was well-worth reading this for.

Yet another book that I would not have picked up on my own and not because it’s LGBTQ+ as that’s not a drawback for me. No, it’s just that I don’t usually read books that are so lyrical and poetic. But the prose is like a song, a poem (and there is plenty of poetry within the text, as well).

But the main thing in the novel’s favor, to me, were the characters—all so very real. And the two main characters, who are never named, are especially compelling and their stories are very real as well. The heartbreak, love, joy—all the emotions—are all very visceral.

I highly recommend A Language of Limbs.

The hard part about writing a succinct review on this book is deciphering what NOT to say about it. This book was everything and more. It is a beautiful portrait of queerness and the different shapes it can take, the different paths queer people take, how being queer is not a singular identity but rather an intersectional one that seeps through every aspect of your being. I loved the dual narrative, I loved the descriptions of love and community, I loved the emphasis on the importance of art and creativity in queer spaces, I loved how queerness was shown as resistance, I loved how queerness was so intimately tied to the body. I loved how each narrator's first love set the stage for how they experienced their queerness throughout the novel. Not to mention, this was one of the most beautifully written novels I have ever read, if not the most. I could go on and on. I am going to buy a hard copy as soon as this comes out, and friends and family of mine can already easily see that I will never shut up about this book.

Books like A Language of Limbs are the reason I read in the first place. I feel stunned by the beauty within these pages and completely altered after finishing the very last one.

We are presented with two limbs of life; limb one, limb two. In each limb, a young woman must decide whether to act on her feelings for her best friend. From there, an entire life is built, and nothing will ever be the same.

I've never read anything like this. The way the author wove small moments from both lives into one another was breathtaking and heartbreaking in equal measure. It really shows how close we always are to a life full of different choices. How a life could have been something else, entirely, if we only made one decision differently.

This will be a queer classic, mark my words.

really beautiful read. feel like it will be so relatable to so many people. I struggled a bit with the writing style, but the overall premise is so fascinating and catching. Raw, honest, and feel like you really get to know the MC.

as a queer girl who grew up in newcastle in the 90s/00s, this literally hits too close to home: i feel taken apart, inspected, put back together again.

Review of uncorrected eBook file

Set in Australia, this poignant look at family, either the one you’re born into or the one you make for yourself, is sometimes gritty, often melodramatic and, here, always heart-wrenching. How do you find your place in the world with the people you’re meant to be with? How do you manage? How do you decide what path to follow?

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Although the unfolding story is told from two perspectives . . . Limb One and Limb Two . . . readers are likely to have some difficulty in identifying who is speaking in each section. The writing is lovely; the two perspectives need a bit more differentiation in order for the reader to easily recognize who is who and what is what.

Overall, this tribute to the LGBTIQ+ community of the 1970s and 1980s is filled with discovery, self-acceptance, and longing, but readers may find it difficult to connect with either of the main characters. Nevertheless, those who enjoy stories in this genre are sure to find the story both emotional and deeply moving.

I received a free copy of this eBook from PENGUIN GROUP Dutton / Dutton and NetGalley
#ALanguageofLimbs #NetGalley

The pursuit or suppression of a teenage girl’s first love sets her life’s path, though the potential of these two lives diverges and collides over the decades during pivotal moments in Dylin Hardcastle’s A Language of Limbs.
In the early 1970s, the choice that a fifteen-year-old girl makes about how to act upon her feelings and desires for her best friend, who happens to be a girl, will determine the path her life takes and the relationships she keeps or builds anew within that life. In choosing to act upon them, in Limb One, the girl leaves home and expands her horizons within a community of people who think and express themselves like she does, protesting and fighting to be accepted simply for who they are and love, all while creating art that voices what she might not otherwise say. In choosing to suppress them, in Limb Two, the girl remains at home, entering into long-term relationships with men, one of whom she marries, and pursuing higher education to fulfil her dream of a career in publishing. The paths of both Limbs over the intervening decades are filled with a sense of longing, loss, grief, and desire, echoing one another in the events that occur as they seize the life, space, and future they deem themselves worthy of occupying, firmly claiming it for their own.
Presenting divergent paths that retain an eerie similarity filled with longing, loss, grief, and fighting to embrace their authentic self within a world that doesn’t want to acknowledge them by persisting in systemic marginalization, the narrative offers a thoughtful exploration of identity and navigating a (re)claiming of language to describe experiences that prove to have universal reach. Limb One and Limb Two, unnamed until the last few pages, provided for great potential in just who they could be and what identity they could claim, mirroring the concept presented at the outset of the novel of either actively pursuing or suppressing their desires as either action would shape who they’d be and would have to potential of becoming. Though providing the Limbs' names offers clarity, a sense of closure, and confirms their identity, lifting the ambiguity also removes some of the contemplative wonder built up over the course of the novel using the parallel paths, as it slips from more nebulous or abstract possibilities of connections drawn from withholding, limited views of the entire picture to a concrete reality by the end that firmly places boundaries on those possibilities; while it does mirror the fact the Limbs made choices within their lives that set their path and the communities they became part of, it reduced some of the intriguing luster that developed along the way. The majority of the novel is written in prose format, but poetry begins to infuse itself throughout Limb One in the latter half as the emotional heft increases and their embrace of self, coupled with the earnest pursuit of what they desire, culminates into a cohesive entity.
Overall, I’d give it a 4.5 out of 5 stars.
*I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This one took me by surprise in a good way. A beautiful story of love and grief but in the most realistic way. The flow was gorgeous and the characters intertwined so well.

The prose in this was wild!

Such a breathtaking, unique, and heartbreaking take on a love story. And where the love in our lives leads us to.

I loved every piece of this gorgeous novel.

A beautiful exploration of grief and love all tied up in one incredible package. The writing was done well, and the language was stunning, but it was a little hard to follow.
I appreciate that this felt like a very genuine and realistic exploration of sapphic love. Infantilization is a huge problem in the community, and I really enjoyed reading about the pain and struggles these two went through, no sugar coating to push against. Just raw, human experiences.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Dutton for the ARC!

gorgeously well-done book with some awesome themes that feels quite literary and at the same time very accessible. 5 stars.tysm for the arc.