We fall into her argument regarding these “heroine texts” and their selfhood trajectory, from “brave to blank to bitter,” eager and unsuspecting. In conversation with research by Nancy Miller, she helps rebrand the literary definition of “heroine,” expanding it considerably into novels that feature women who are less extraordinary than representative. Tolentino extracts the foundational relationship each of the protagonists and their societies has to men, both familiar to them and in the abstract, and studies it. Her examples range from adolescent to adult women, mostly contemporary, some classic, all oozing with the nostalgia one naturally imposes when reading about one’s past. In one of the longer essays, “Pure Heroines,” Tolentino walks readers down a lovely road of vignettes of their childhood literary favorites, all reverently analyzed, slipping into writing about writing. Her sharp sense of self-awareness and disillusionment brew together to create nine essays that are inherently millennial, challenging in thought, and a perfect mix of academia and story. Jia Tolentino’s collection of essays, Trick Mirror, is a critical study of the internet age, capitalism, and religion through the slant of her own contemporary feminism.
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