MixedOpen Letters ReviewPart I, \'Coventry,\' has Cusk ruminating most on her perception of how stories are made and how her multiple identities—mother, divorcee, car accident witnesser—participate in a degree of paralysis she feels when indulging in a voluntary \'suspension of disbelief\' ... Cusk displays an infectious enthusiasm in her prose to try unmasking the supposed linearity of life. Her essays frequently interrogate a thought, question, or hiccup of an idea ... Cusk’s essays create her own roadmap to making sense of her intentional disbelief both in her life and in her stories ... Without ever trying to convince the reader to join alongside her plights with pitying retail employees or digesting her ex-husband’s perspective on her own brand of feminism, Cusk doesn’t entirely convince me to keep reading this collection either.
Jia Tolentino
PositiveOpen Letters Review...Tolentino doesn’t altogether pour out confessionals strictly damning the Internet, nor does she pinpoint where the future of our screen worlds are going. Instead, she thoughtfully—and humorously—offers critical inquiry into why digital spaces have the power to inflict our physical senses offline, without portraying the Internet as this nightmarish entity living under our beds. By concocting a compelling hybrid of the person essay and journalistic reportage, Tolentino gives readers what is, perhaps, the most powerful outcome that reading about the Internet—not just content spawned from it—can extend to us: assessing our own indulgence to be seduced by self-delusion ... Every essay in Trick Mirror appears to indicate that, whether Tolentino recounts her dizzying teen realty TV stardom, remembers growing up in Texas amidst a church-going culture she felt displaced from, and more, there remains an intense presence of fragility, nostalgia, and anxiety that permeates the pages. The lucid quality to Tolentino’s writing is consistently endearing throughout because of understanding the construction of her identity taking shape during the Internet’s own infancy ... Ultimately, Trick Mirror is a coming of age novel for the Internet itself. The cultural significances that Tolentino highlights in her essays are not out of bias or of rank, but seek to enlighten and, strangely, kind of tease the Internet where to go from here ... Whatever the Internet may bring, I hope it continues to shine a light on Tolentino’s promising career.
