Now that I’ve mentioned content: I didn’t like this book very much. I found myself skipping some pages here and there because I was bored with the content the book was providing.

While she delves into a little about herself during the academic essays, she doesn’t do it enough, which loses my interest as a reader. Personally, I found these essays, despite how little of them there were, to be the true skeleton of the book. One of these essays is about how when she was in high school, she auditioned for a reality television show as a joke and then was flown to Puerto Rico to be actually on the show. I found the strongest essays in this collection to be the ones where Tolentino is actually talking about herself the majority of the time. With that being said, let’s dive into this book review. These are all hot topics in today’s world, making this a relevant read if you want to educate yourself a bit more. Some of these essays are more academic in nature, delving into the world of social media and its psychological impacts, or examining heroines throughout film and literary history (most, if I may say, are white). Trick Mirror is a nonfiction essay collection, one that borders into cultural criticism territory. And so I checked it out and read it within two hours (this seems to be a common theme, me just sitting and ploughing through books nowadays). As I was looking for something to read at the library, I saw this on the shelf, and recognized it immediately due to the hype it had. Obama had even put it on one of his readings lists, it has thousands of reviews on Goodreads, and it was literally everywhere when it came out in 2019. This book, Trick Mirror, also has major hype. She’s a staff writer over at The New Yorker and I’ve read quite of few of her pieces throughout the years.

As an avid reader of The New Yorker whenever I can get my paws on one of the flash sales (which are frequent, it depends on how broke I am that month to be frank), I recognize the name Jia Tolentino almost immediately.

Trick mirror review