Jia Tolentino is a brilliant writer: she gets to the heart of the matter and is a brilliant chronicler of our times. I am a fan of her work in The New Yorker and it was a treat to have much of her work in one place.

I started this with all the best intentions of trying something new, being inspired by thoughtful essays. Unfortunately I found it difficult to engage with the book and ended up putting it down in favour of other books on my shelf.

Maybe I will come around to picking it up again and have something more insightful to share in the future! I fear it’s probably just not my thing though.

Undoubtedly the most intelligent and rigorous essay collection on the Internet age, and specifically Internet feminism, that I’ve yet read. Tolentino’s a New Yorker staff writer and she is not content with platitudes about millennial culture or about the deleterious effects of social media on our attention spans; she’s much more interested in dissecting how things happen, what the exact circumstances are that result in malaise, or trolling, or a specific cultural phenomenon. Outstanding.

I loved this. It really got me thinking. Relates the issues without hammering you over the head or being overly or overtly confrontational. Highly recommended.

This was such an interesting collection of essays, written from the heart and soul. I think, in my mid thirties, I am slightly too old to be the target demographic, but I loved hearing from a different point of view. This is part of the point of essays, I think - to see the world from another perspective!

I absolutely loved this essay collection. I think Tolentino sets the bar generally for culturally relevant pieces that take a totally new look at the issue. Her voice is clear and unique, her prose rich and surprising. I'm always left with something new to think about whenever I read anything by her so to have a whole book filled with her take on different things was a bit of a dream. I particularly enjoyed the essay about the athleisure industry (would also encourage a read of one of her recent pieces for The New Yorker on women's slogan clothing). She has an ability to articulate so many things that I and others think but better than we ever could. More intelligently, more succinctly, more directly. This is a superior example of the essay collection genre and whilst we're seeing more and more pop up, and no doubt this volume will "inspire" a whole new wave of them too, this will remain the best.

Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror is, at many points, just that: a mirror. One that has been held up to modern society in order to show all of its contradictory complexities. To pop up and say “hey, what about reality shows, or trolls, or the self-aggrandising on social media?”. This, this, that. A social world, lives the world over, condensed into a list of unconnected essay topics.
After-all, this central idea - this ever-present mirror - ultimately disallows the collection from ever reaching its full potential. Because, even when, with wit and flair, Tolentino poses the beginning of an argument, she never actually ever reaches the bare bones of a central argument. All of the pieces, rather, kept seeming to stop; cut off before an actual point could be made or a conclusion could be reached.
It was like listening to politicians: pages and pages of words being relayed, but no actual point or meaning ever being actually conveyed. Some of the essays lacked, therefore, lacked any sort of purpose; they meandered along a stream of carefully chosen words yet they never seemed to get anywhere. Because, after-all, that is what a mirror does: it shows you something, but it never actually ever tells you what to think about it. It has no opinions, or agenda, or thoughts of its own. It just… shows.

Jia Tolentino offers a millennial account on feminism, drugs and reality TV, delivering some unexpected insights. In this collection of essays, Tolentino’s success lies in yoking together the contemporary and the classical. From social media to the gig economy, she writes about modern mores with studied hipness. She favours first-person narration over the scrupulous detachment of traditional New Yorker reporting. An alumna of the spiky, “supposedly feminist” website Jezebel, her writing remains impressionistic and intimate.

And it’s only through her authorial control that Trick Mirror is captivating, with themes gliding into one another rather than messily piling up.

I said it about another book recently but it's more relevant here: I have seen this book <i>everywhere</i>, and so I was interested to finally read it. Cultural touch points and personal anchors take the reader through the rise of the internet, scams from Facebook to the ill-fated #GirlBoss, literary heroines and more. Around self-delusion and the general ideas of pinpointing the self, it's a really good book. Essay collections are on the rise and (personally) have been a bit hit and miss of late so I don't read them as often as I used to, but I feel like I would read literally anything from Jia based on this.

Oh sweet lord in heaven this book broke my brain and I love Jia Tolentino for it. I can't stop thinking about almost every single piece in this book and I'm pretty sure there's no better writer of essays working today. People often compare her to Didion and I love Didion but Tolentino is better. Break your brain wide open and read this book.

I'm so glad I requested this, I've been seeing it everywhere since I did. Absolutely fascinating read, Jia Tolentino is funny and incisive.

This book of essays is an absolute banger. I will be recommending it to all my friends and buying a ton of copies for Christmas - I'm three-quarters of the way through and don't want it to end. Like a mix of Sloane Crosley and Dolly Alderton with a side of Jon Ronson and Barbara Ehrenreich. That's just as weird as it sounds. As well as tech and self-image, topics include reality TV (and the author's stint on a low-budget show in the early noughties on a channel called Noggin); religion (in a surprisingly moving chapter about a strange Texan church and a famous local DJ addicted to cough syrup) and Fyre Festival - and who doesn't LOVE revisiting Fyre Festival?! A ++ for Jia.

I absolutely loved this book and it that came as a surprise to me because it took me over a month to get through the first essay. Needless to say, that wasn't my favourite essay. The rest of the collection, however, blew me away and each one was delightful and powerful. My favourite essays have to be Pure Heroine and Ecstasy.
This was a powerful collection because the breadth of the essays, literature, technology, journalism, rape culture, heroines, gender, racial discrimination and much more are all intertwined together to create a wonderful commentary on society today.
The collection also featured a wonderful balance between the topic and the her own personal thoughts on the topic. The personal thoughts and feelings made it less clinical.
My only criticism, which really isn't too bad, is whilst I was glad for the intertwining to the topics sometimes it took a long time for her to explain why we had suddenly gone off tangent, Tolentino always brought it back to the topic at hand but sometimes it was easy to find yourself lost in a completely new story or bit of information and think 'how does this relate to the original topic?'. Aside from this brilliant, the collection is self-indulgent at times but totally being forgiven because it's aware of what it is. Brilliant title and brilliant content.

Trick Mirror absolutely blew me away - the best book of essays I have read this year... and last... maybe even ever. I feel about 500% cleverer than I did when I started reading it - Jia Tolentino is SO SMART, I can't even articulate how smart. I raved about the book on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/Hilary_Alison/status/1177279754694795266, and will be continuing to rave about it for the rest of my days!

Jia Tolentino is a mind reader. It felt as though she knew exactly what I would think, every page of this book. Not only did I relate to so much of it, also being a young woman who spends a lot of time online, but she managed to preempt and expertly counter all my arguments, or misgivings about what she was writing about. It is unsettling, but not in the topics it tackles, like I thought, but because it showed me what I really think about an issue, even things I haven't been able to articulate yet. This is a sharp, honest and thought provoking essay collection, where each chapter provides a different mirror or prism through which we can use the subject to better - or maybe just differently - see ourselves and those around us. However, just as you begin to nod along too much or over identify, she pulls the rug out from beneath you to show the futility of any sort of self definition in an world in which everything is so temporary and fleeting. Her subjects range from Trump's America, her own stint on reality tv women and the beauty myth, literary heroines (with a brilliant close reading of Elena Ferrante, which thrilled me), megachurches and religion, Fyre Festival and the wedding industry, and the writing is excellent. I need to read more of her.

This essay collection was much more scholarly than I was expecting (not a bad thing) and I really enjoyed it. I hadn’t read anything by Jim Tolentino before but I found her essays to be incredibly thoughtful and detailed. All the essays were good but I particularly enjoyed the one about millennial scamming, and about female celebrity and criticism. I would love to read more from her on both these subjects.

This is an incredibly strong essay collection, brought down by a first essay that did not work for me and made picking this back up difficult for me. But once I finished that first essay, Jia Tolentino gives the reader an incredibly well-structured and presented collection. I know why this was one of my most anticipated reads for this year.

Jia Tolentino writes about many different things but always through a lense of feminism and internet culture – something I particularly adore as a feminist who is very much online. Her essays have a rambling quality that worked exceedingly well for me because I could trust her to pull her different strands of argument back together by the end of each essay. She combines the personal with the political, always underpinning her arguments with quotes and statistics in a highly effective way. This is the type of essay collection I adore.

My absolute favourite essay of this collection is about ecstacy – both the drug and the concept in religion. Tolentino reflects on her own religious upbringing, her relationship to drugs, her discovery of Houston’s hip hop scene, and her experience with god in a way that should not work for me (I am not particularly interested in any of these topics on their own) but that was just incredible. If you are only going to read one essay from this collection, make sure it is this one.

Content warning: discussions of rape culture and rape, bigotry, misogyny, racism.

I realise I am not the intended audience for this collection of essays as I'm some way out of the age range of Ms Tolentino and millenials but I don't want to live in an echo chamber and I found it very enlightening to read this young woman's words. This is a very well written, thought provoking series of essays with no real cohesion other than the current world we are living in. She is an honest and careful writer and has a lot to say.

Ms Tolentino says "Writing is either a way to shed my self delusions or a way to develop them." She writes about the internet, athletic wear, drugs, scamming, and her time on a reality TV programme. I read them one at a time and left reflection time in between as there is a lot being said here that needs thinking about.

Recommended if you're of an age when you think "the young" have little worthwhile to say. There is little self delusion apparent to me here, just well argued, interesting points of view that deserve to be heard.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.

Trick Mirror is everything you could want from a modern collection of essays. Its funny, insightful and thought provoking.
My favourites are the essays in which Tolentino discusses modern life (the internet, #metoo, modern feminism) but her autobiographical stories are equally compelling.
Many of the stories trail off in random directions but rather than feeling unfocused it’s like going on an unexpected journey and learning new things along the way.
While so many of the ideas raised deserve a lot of consideration and require time to digest, Trick Mirror never feels heavy handed and is so accessible.
I’m really enjoying discussing the book with anyone I can find and getting all my friends to read it.
Thank you to Netgalley and 4th Estate for the advanced copy.

This book completely lived up to the hype. I have been following Jia's writing for a while but this essay collection surpassed my expectations. She is so insightful about current feminist issues and has a refreshing take on a number of things. Particularly loved her essay on weddings -- it felt very relatable!