RaveThe Brooklyn RailTolentino’s debut collection of nine essays, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, comes at a crucial point where the internet chimera of identity, culture, and politics has mutated beyond recognition. Where many of us recoil in terror, Tolentino buckles up and enters the fray ... Tolentino’s writing is not just deft and insightful—it’s thrilling. It’s edifying. It has the effect of making you feel smarter and sharper without diminishing your sense of recreation or discovery, like a very good study drug ... What is so compelling about Trick Mirror is that Tolentino does not stop her interrogation where it is neat and convenient to stop ... While Tolentino’s cultural criticisms shine in their clarity, it is her personal essays—charismatic, magnetic, at times dazzling—that I consumed like candy ... More than anything else—her clarity of insight, or brilliance with words—Jia Tolentino has a talent for evoking an uncanny feeling that she has read your mind. Trick Mirror somehow feels as much an extension of my own life as it is of hers.
