RavePorter House Review[The essays] twist and turn around multiple narratives at once, rarely reaching a traditional conclusion. The work coalesces around a few recurring themes: the monetization of the self, women’s roles in a world that increasingly demands more and rewards less, and the futility of trying to ethically and morally navigate a culture that seems to only reward corruption ... Tolentino arrives at an idea that, for me, permeates most of the essays in Trick Mirror: the centering and subsequent monetization of the self ... It’s not easy to criticize the mechanisms of your success, but Tolentino turns each topic around like a Rubik’s Cube, looking at it from every side, rearranging possibilities but never quite solving the puzzle ... The feeling of despair at seeing something good twisted inward—being used only to enforce the existing system—is deepest in \'Ecstasy,\' the best and most ambitious essay in the book. The writing is beautiful, and the braiding of topics as disparate as megachurches, chopped-and-screwed rap music, and of course ecstasy (of both the spiritual and drug variety) is so well done it feels ecstatic in itself ... \'Ecstasy\' also showcases one of the things I love most about Tolentino’s writing: her pop sensibility. It’s not often a writer can write eloquently about the ecstatic feeling she gets from drugs and chopped and screwed and marry that with the intellectual and spiritual rigor of Anne Carson, but Tolentino pulls it off as if the internet were as natural to her as the library ... The illusion of a juice press as a marker of clout, of religion as a benevolent and benign source of ecstasy, of efficiency as an always laudable goal—all of these subjects feel explored fully, turned inside out.