Title: A Language of Limbs
Author: Dylin Hardcastle
Series: N/A
Dates Read: 21/09/2024
Published Date: 25 June 2024
Genre: LGBTQIA+, Contemporary
Pages: 284
Pace: Slow
Content Warnings (May contain spoilers)
Abandonment, Alcohol/Alcoholism, Cursing, Domestic abuse, Drug use, Forced institutionalisation, Grief, Hate crime, Homophobia, Miscarriage, Murder, Outing, Pandemic/
Epidemic, Police brutality, Pregnancy, Sexism, Violence.
Who is this for? Young Adults, Adults.
This book covers:
- Exploring sexuality in a time where it could get you killed.
- The AIDS pandemic and its effects on Australia in the 80s.
Format/Disclosure: Library, paperback.
Rating: 2.75⭐
Review:
A Language of Limbs is the tale of 2 women – or “limbs” as they’re called in the book – with parallel lives coming close to interacting, but jerking away at the last minute. We follow Limb One, a proudly out lesbian and her struggles with acceptance, relationships, and life, and Limb Two, a woman plagued by doubt and internalised homophobia, struggling with her identity and who she truly is. The book spans three decades, from teenagehood through, with the various romantic relationships, friendships, and societal reactions/impacts to their lives and who they are.
I decided to read this book after seeing it on a Top 50 new releases of 2024, and I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about the book. I found Limb One to be arrogant, self-centred, and far too focused on sex over the people she was having it with. She put people on a pedestal and seemingly forgot that they were people with their own thoughts, opinions, and emotions. I won’t deny that she had many difficult events, which I can’t go into without spoiling the book, but even considering that, she just kinda.. sucked.
Limb Two, on the other hand, was much more meek/mild – dealing with the difficulties of being in the closet/struggling with her sexuality. Is she a lesbian? Is she bisexual? Is she something else? Can she happily spend her life with a man? We follow her story as she falls in love, marries, gets pregnant, and the path she follows with her life. Limb Two seems far more consumed by her thoughts, and the sections featuring her seem to be more vague and less action-heavy – In the sense of doing things. Limb One is constantly doing things, in real time, while we see large spans of time pass with Limb Two.
I have 2 main issues with this book – Firstly, there never seemed to be any real growth with either of the characters, which obviously isn’t a requirement and everybody lives life in their own way, but Limb One seemed to spend her entire life only caring about sex, and after a particularly sad event, it seemed her focus was solely on sex and how much she missed it. There was a scene of her masturbating while thinking of someone, and I just felt very.. gross, by it all. Limb Two also seems to stay very stagnant in who she is, no matter her age. She has no backbone, and there are multiple times that her boyfriend/husband says something, and internally she doesn’t agree with him, however outwardly she either agrees with him or simply changes the subject, and then is back to thinking about how much she loves him/how amazing he is, which just felt a bit like whiplash. My other issue is that the book mentions heavily how it focuses on the AIDS pandemic, and although it is mentioned, it didn’t really feel like it was a main topic, like I was expecting. It’s not until quite late in the book that we even reach the time of it, and then within a few chapters, we seem to have progressed to a later date and it’s only mentioned in passing. I was expecting a much larger focus on the pandemic as a whole and the outreaching effects of it.
I found the writing style of this book to be dfficult to get into – it was very poetic, but also just a bit pretentious? I constantly just felt like maybe I was too dumb to understand what the author was saying, and everything just felt a bit too much/overdone. Although the chapters were named “limb one” and “limb two”, it still took me until chapter 3 or 4 to realise they were actually different people, and it wasn’t until they were living vastly different lives that I found it easier to differentiate between the two. I also thought their story together may have been a bigger part of the book, but it just wasn’t.