The Language of Limbs has an intriguing premise and an original approach to exploring the complexities of human connection, but it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. The concept is strong, and the author does a great job creating an atmosphere that feels both emotional and immersive. The central idea of using physical gestures and body language as a form of communication is unique and adds an interesting layer to the narrative.

However, the pacing felt slow at times, and some of the characters didn’t feel fully developed. While the themes of communication and connection are powerful, the execution occasionally left me wanting more depth and clarity. The emotional impact I was hoping for wasn’t as strong as I anticipated.

Overall, it’s a solid read with some thought-provoking moments, but it fell short of its potential. It’s definitely worth checking out if you enjoy exploring unconventional narratives, but it didn’t quite hit the mark for me.

A Language of Limbs truly blew me away. Being only my second read of 2025 this one is going to be hard to beat. The prose in this novel was exquisite and made me want to voraciously eat up every word. The portrayal in this novel of sexuality, queerness, grief, love and everything in between was so distinctly relatable and raw and heavily resonated with me in many aspects. Limb 1 and Limb 2 take us through the lows and highs of living and in some ways their lives are echoes of each other and what could have been. I loved when some of the language in the alternate chapters mimicked each other and we could see how maybe they will eventually find their way to one another. Queer joy and love is so glorious when it is able to be realized and expressed wholeheartedly and it was phenomenal to see so much diverse representation in this book while till portraying the darkness that the LGBTQIA+ community has gone through and continues to go through to this day. There is so much joy to be had in being who you truly are.

Below are some of my favorite quotes from this wonderful novel:

"Only in my dreams, where she will lurk in the river veins of my limbs, stirring from time to time like silt stirred up from the bed of my sleeping body, clouding the water. And I will wake every time in the cold sweat of this very heartbreak, as if no time has passed at all. Because the river of mountain memory is achingly fresh."

"There is no light in there, no air, no room to fuck, no place to sleep. It is safe, for a time, perhaps. But a body in there will erode. Until its flesh is all gone and it becomes a secret of bones. To come out is to escape the secret, to stretch your limbs and bathe your skin in light. Sometimes. Because to come out can also be a sharper death, a quicker death. Total obliteration."

"Grief is wanting flesh, yearning for a voice. Grief is fear of forgetting...a face...the contour of a hip...your brilliant red hair...Grief is wondering what could have been made and what could have become. Grief is what if. Grief is endless cycles of why, and I wish I didn't. Grief is the guilt of the living, of my living. Grief is the sobbing into my birthday cake, because I'm older than you, now. Grief is the building of a world without you in it."

"At some point, between a kick and a breath, the thought of staying has become more terrifying than the thought of leaving."

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC. This book resonated with me on every level as a queer person. I loved the writing style and the way the story unfolded through the perspectives of two different narrators.

There were so many moments when I was completely captivated by the prose. Dylin has a gift for words that creates vivid imagery on the page. The characters' emotions are expressed so powerfully that it truly tugs at your heartstrings. Reading it felt like an exhilarating emotional rollercoaster, picking up speed with each page.

Exploring one's queer identity is a challenging journey, and I can’t even begin to imagine how much more difficult it was during a pandemic.

I loved this book.

Started reading this book at the end of 2024 and finished it 6 days into 2025 and I can honestly say this is and will be the BEST book I read all year. It is a tragically beautiful, poetic exploration of how two people can exist in the same place at the same time and live two completely different lives. With different love, joy, heartbreak and grief. And yet they are one and the same, in the near misses of their worlds colliding and in the parallels of their experiences and their interpretation of the world around them. And to see how it all comes together in the end and how through each other we can find happiness after loss is the icing on top of this already perfect cake. And instant reread with a permanent place on my shelf (both digital and physical)

I’m glad to see I’m not alone in assuming the two characters were the same person in two alternative realities. There were definitely moments where this didn’t make sense so partly my fault for assuming, but to be fair the two voices sound identical.

I genuinely liked it better before I realized it wasn’t an alternative reality vs just two people. An alternate timeline is so much more interesting and the repeating motifs work a lot better in that framing. I thought it was going to be like In Universes by Emet North which was one of my favourite books of 2024.

All that aside, there were some things that worked for me better than others. I loved the exploration of found family, the descriptions of sydney and wales, and the devastation of the AIDS crisis. I also enjoyed the recurring theme of porous boundaries between ourselves/others/the world, which was also a theme I loved in In Universes.

The exploration of creating art collaboratively with a lover was also done well and reminded me of Housemates by Emma Copley-Eisenberg, although I didn’t enjoy the poetry included on the page here.

Some of the lines were truly beautiful and moving and poetic, but others felt a bit cheesy tumblr motivational image to me, and the (brief) reference to the pandemic felt cringey.

This isn’t a bad book by any means, and there were parts I enjoyed, but I think it maybe tried to tackle too much for its length which meant certain threads were underdeveloped.

The back and forth format was a bit confusing at the beginning of the book. But as the gritty and heart wrenching stories playout, the reader is fully engaged with the lives of the main characters. I enjoyed this book and the insight into the history and culture of LGBTQ people in the 1970's- 1980's Australia. Their fight for acceptance and rights, and the heartbreak of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980's.

I'm heartbroken to say this didn't work for me. I hit a couple of paragraphs that read so melodramatic after an already melodramatic scene that I had to pause and think about whether I wanted to continue with the book. The answer is no, it's a DNF at 25%.

I was already struggling with this book after the first few chapters and it took me like 20% to realize that we're following two different perspectives. I thought "limb one" and "limb two" were just different timelines from one perspective because they sound exactly the same, there's no difference in voice or inner thoughts at all.

Overall, I agree with reviewers who mention this is overwritten. It is. Though I won't deny there are beautiful lines here and there, it feels pretentious. I also found it too melodramatic, like I already said, and I felt like it was trying to force emotion out of me. I was also painfully aware that I was reading a book, you know? I was aware that things happened just because the author wrote them that way. I don't even know if that will make sense to anyone else, but I just wasn't engrossed by this story.

At times, I found it challenging to discern whose point of view I was reading (Limb One or Limb Two), often relying on context or the mention of a character specific to their lives to clarify. Initially, the novel didn’t fully capture my interest, but about halfway through, the narrative truly began to shine. At this point, the story delved deeply into the main character’s life, and their actions vividly reflected their personality. I grew increasingly invested in the supporting characters and felt genuinely moved when they faced hardships, which speaks to the emotional depth of the writing.

Whoa. What can I say about this book? It felt like a true window into queer experiences. It felt like joy and pain, finding out and embracing exactly who you are and also finding out who you are and completely denying it. It felt like love and loss. It felt like fear and safety. It was a lot. It was written super beautifully. There was poetry in parts which I feel unequipped to describe or critique because I can’t quite wrap my mind around poetry. This is the book I’ve highlighted most in recent memory. It followed two perspectives of queer women deciding how to move through a world not built for them. They choose almost completely opposite strategies despite the fact that their stories nearly intersect any number of times. The chapters alternate between their two vastly differently and hauntingly similar experiences throughout the book. There are times where the author throws the similarities in seemingly opposite experiences in the reader’s face by literally including the same phrases and sometimes completely paragraphs in subsequent chapters. It was so good. The cover is lovely, the title is beautiful and the story is lovely, beautiful and haunting. If you want to immerse yourself in a beautifully told pair of queer narratives then you should certainly pick this up. Here are the endless quotes I highlighted:

“And I liked how it felt, being turned inside out, learning that the self becomes whole in the moment it is opened.”

“As if she is breaking apart in the same moment that she is becoming whole, both coming undone and being built through the violence of metamorphosis—the process of taking shape.”

“Thomas speaks the way feathers fall. In that roundabout way where the words drift and ebb and are slow to land.”

“I feel as if my lungs are on fire, like I might, in a moment, smell the reed of my muscle burning.”

“And so, I am left, feverishly remembering, until her face is a memory of a memory of a memory of a memory, like ink in water, dispersing, and I’m not sure if we ever locked eyes at all.”

“And I feel the throb of this moment. Because, against the impossibility of it all, joy persists.”

“It’s raining outside, now, small footprints of sky on the windowpane.”

“Swallow and feed the memory pushed back under. Sunk down. As her face resettles on the ocean floor of my body, I feel the strangle of disgust loosen. Breath out. A twisted sigh. Heart slowing. Relief.”

“Language falls short. Because she falls. Slowly, she falls, falling through air spiraling down through all the years lived, back to the very beginning, into the darkness from which she was birthed and into which she ends, her skull cracked open on concrete.”

“Adrenaline fades into blood and the container of my grief disintegrates.”

“Her death is like a bird slamming into a window. The sudden shock that the sky has limits. That my motherhood was a trick of light.”

“Her death is like a birth slamming into a window. The sudden shock that the sky has limits. That our liberation was a trick of light.”

“I don’t imagine how this will affect me, how it will crush me, to see her coffin overwhelmed by bodies that got to grow fully.”

“You didn’t look particularly striking, and yet, I was entirely struck, the way lightning turns sand to glass.”

“Because you came over me like a wave. And I dove through the belly of the ocean, where I have been, ever since. With you, I could exist underwater. And in the beginning, I panicked. Because everything we’ve ever been told, tells us we cannot breathe underwater. I wanted to stay, but I thought, I need air, I need air. This isn’t how we are supposed to live, they say. But by both luck and necessity, my body changed. My lungs became gills. I had learnt to exist otherwise, and to live entirely in it.”

“Now I will keep you alive by love, loving you ceaselessly. In every movement of every murmuration.”

“Let the water carry what you can’t.”

“I learn how loneliness is felt most acutely in the presence of another person when the intimacy is gone.”

“I’m no longer resenting my flesh for what it couldn’t become.”

“Her breath was the anchor that settled me.”

Thank you, NetGalley and Publisher, for this ARC!

3.75 This novel was devastatingly beautiful. As someone who hasn't read many stories that take place in Australia and not one that takes place around the AIDS crisis, I didn't know what to expect. The book was beautifully written and tugged at my heartstrings throughout. However, this is not with critique. This novel had two perspectives and timelines, and as someone who didn't know this before starting, the fact that the two perspectives are so similar and difficult to tell apart. I only noticed this when I began observing significant inconsistencies in the plot due to merging both timelines. I discovered this after the 20% mark, if not further into the novel. While Hardcastle writes incredibly poetically, and his novel feels immersive, the book could be improved if the two timelines were more distinct. Overall, though, I highly recommend this book and the cover is absolutely stunning.

This book felt like your favorite song that makes you feel sad, but brings so much joy as you finish singing it. It’s lyrical, beautiful, heart-felt and just honestly really good. I don’t want to give anything away, but the queer love in this story is gorgeous and you don’t want to look away from the story. Easily 10 stars out of 5!

This book was lovely. A lyric meditation on queer love in the 70s and 80s, focusing on two young women (limb one and limb two) as they go on their individual and sometimes intersecting journeys of discovery and identity.

I see what other people have said about it being overwritten--the lyric impulses of the text are front and center, and if lyricism is anathema to you, this might not be your book. But I really enjoyed floating on the dreamy language and encountering the interior lives of limb one and limb two as they journey through their lives. The intense interiority of these two women sucked me in as a literary device.

The ending felt a bit rushed, I suppose, but for a novel about journeys of inner discovery, the plottiness of the end bit matters less than the arrival of both characters to self-acceptance and knowing. I cried during multiple parts of the last third of the book. It spoke to me deeply, and I'm glad it exists in the world.

This was like a punch in the gut, but in a healing way. It's rare to see a similar story of my own queerness on the pages of a novel. i had to read it in small amounts because it was all too real, all too relatable.

I wanted to enjoy this book, but unfortunately it didn’t resonate as deeply with me as I hoped. The premise of two similar characters who follow diverging life paths was interesting, but I felt like I couldn’t connect with either. The book is relatively short, and if you consider each “limb” a separate story, it really consists of two novellas. I saw some other reviewers mention that it wasn’t initially clear there were two separate characters, and I shared this confusion (I thought the author was portraying the same character in alternative timelines). The poetry that was incorporated into the book didn’t speak to me, but poetry is highly subjective, and clearly many other readers appreciated it.

The sudden, fateful romances between Caragh and one of the protagonists (and a later relationship toward the end of the novel) didn’t speak to me. I would have liked to see more development of their relationships, rather than immediately jumping to passionate love and sex after merely glimpsing each other in the street. Again, though, I can see how this type of romance could appeal to some audiences.

I appreciated the portrayal of queer life in the 70s and 80s, and I thought the peripheral characters of the Uranian House were touching. I hope more publishers take on queer and trans authors writing queer and trans stories in the future.

This book was a DNF for me. I am so greatful for the arc and I think the writing in this book is absolutely beautiful. Unfortunately this book came to me at the wrong point in my life. Just because it is not for me right now doesn’t mean it’s not a good book, I can recognize talent when I see it and this book is really so well written. It is lyrical and smooth and makes you feel so much for the characters. I think maybe in a couple years time this book might be a favorite of mine, I just need todo some maturing first.

This book sounded like the songs Piano Man and Pink Pony Club. I felt a sense of longing and nostalgia for a time and place I’ve never experienced. When I tell you these characters felt so real and so believable, phew! There was an emotional connection to nearly all characters introduced that made *every single one* memorable.

I’d argue this is near perfection. I’ve struggled to write this review because of how speechless A Language of Limbs has left me. I need a movie, a series, more books from the author PLEASE.

5/5I

This was a very interesting book, defiantly a tear jerker and a sense of being scene. it was surely a story to be told, not everyone will appreciate it but it was defiantly needed to put out in the universe to tell the story. I was very emotional when they told a story so devastating, but still have resolved.

this was quite a confronting and really emotional read, partially because i know little of how australia handled the AIDS crisis and partially because every time I turn to queer history i’m struck but how much has been lost, and how much we are only now recovering. that said, i wish the narrators’ voices were more distinct from one another.

This is a novel about love and being who you are. While Australian author Dylin Hardcastle identifies as transmasculine, the novel is about lesbian love. The nonbinary struggle does not really surface. But we get some wonderful history through the lenses of personal/fictional stories.

We follow two women characters who survive— two limbs. Traversing the 70s and 80s in time, the story even takes us through the tragedy of AIDS/HIV. Gay and lesbian bashing, a heterosexual relationship, writing and publishing as queer, some great lesbian sex, and questions about the very word queer are all thrown into this very readable and enjoyable novel. The two stories converge in the end but I won't say how. It is beautifula nd poetic. I am glad I read it.

The Language of Limbs is a tour de force, a book I’d recommend to anyone curious about the struggles queer people have had over the past few decades and to any of us ready to remember and in the end feel the pain and the pride.

A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle | 5 Stars

Some books make you feel seen. Some reach inside you and won’t let go. “A Language of Limbs” does both—and then some.

Reading A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle is like peeling back layers of longing, love, and loss. It’s one of those rare stories that’s so beautifully written and deeply moving that, once it’s over, you’ll wish you could erase it from memory just to experience it all over again for the first time. Hardcastle doesn’t just tell a story; they build an entire universe of human connection and choice that lingers long after the final page.

The Story
Set in 1970s Newcastle and Sydney, Australia, A Language of Limbs follows two parallel lives of a teenage girl standing at a life-changing crossroads. In one version (Limb One), she runs after a kiss with her neighbor leads to rejection and exile from her family. Her escape brings her to Uranian House, a queer communal home where she discovers family and community, building a life defined by freedom and authenticity. In the alternate timeline (Limb Two), she stays the course, suppresses her desire, and heads to university, following a more “acceptable” path.

In each life, we see the same young woman struggling, growing, and searching for herself. The two versions of her life almost brush against each other, intersecting in moments of heartbreak, love, and, ultimately, a shared battle against the AIDS crisis. Through bars and protests, classrooms and hospital rooms, Hardcastle gives us a tender epic that celebrates chosen family, self-discovery, and the quiet, fierce joy that lives in the shadows of pain.

Why It’s So Powerful
This is a story about the paths we take—and the ones we don’t. The alternating “Limbs” aren’t just clever structuring; they’re emotional explorations of identity and resilience that lay bare what it means to choose love, community, and courage, even when the world doesn’t make room for you. Hardcastle’s writing is raw, poetic, and utterly honest. Each character, each moment, is crafted with such care that you feel it deeply.

Final Take
Hardcastle has given us a masterpiece that’s equal parts love letter and lament, a story about the weight of choices and the power of love and community. If you’re ready to laugh, cry, and hold on tight, A Language of Limbs will take you there. It’s a book that deserves every one of its five stars—and then some.

This is one you’ll want to keep on your shelf, reread, and treasure for years to come.