PanThe Independent (UK)The problem with trying to emulate Cher on the page, though, is that her voice is particularly distinct: a dryer-than-dry mix of innocence, bluntness and almost masculine swagger ... On the page, absolutely wild tales from Cher’s life are told with sleepy matter-of-factness.
Britney Spears
PositiveThe Independent (UK)Bleak, relentless and angry, a portrait of a woman no longer in the eye of the storm but surveying, dazed and indignant, the wreckage left in its wake ... Spears seems to remember little of her early fame; anecdotes are often half-told. What she remembers with heartbreaking specificity are smaller, familial slights ... If Spears’s memoir leaves readers with anything, though, it’s the knowledge that she deserves some kind of peace.
Jia Tolentino
PositiveThe IndependentThose deep dives into internet culture provide the collection with many of its most profound moments ... it’s only through [Tolentino\'s] authorial control that Trick Mirror is all so endlessly captivating, themes gliding into one another rather than messily piling up. It’s a risky format that doesn’t always work – an essay in which she tracks her own life through the literary heroines she grew up with never truly coalesces – but is always nonetheless rewarding. Only some, as is the case with any collection of essays, are more rewarding than others ... At the end of each of her essays here, Tolentino struggles to discern any real answers. In some cases, she’s almost fatalistic, acknowledging the likelihood of social and economic collapse, or the pointlessness of speculating about things that are, whether we acknowledge them or not, here already. But there is something deeply comforting about the fact that for every ponderous and neurotic question we ask ourselves about the internet or capitalism or how to live and breathe in 2019, somewhere out there is Tolentino, if far more eloquent and thoughtful than we could ever be, asking them too.
