November 3, 2020 | No Comments
Instant Karma
by Marissa Meyer
Date Published: November 3, 2020
Published By: Feiwel & Friends
Page Count: 400
Publisher’s Description:
Chronic overachiever Prudence Barnett is always quick to cast judgment on the lazy, rude, and arrogant residents of her coastal town. Her dreams of karmic justice are fulfilled when, after a night out with her friends, she wakes up with the sudden ability to cast instant karma on those around her.
Pru giddily makes use of the power, punishing everyone from public vandals to mean gossips, but there is one person on whom her powers consistently backfire: Quint Erickson, her slacker of a lab partner. Quint is annoyingly cute and impressively noble, especially when it comes to his work with the rescue center for local sea animals.
When Pru resigns herself to working at the rescue center for extra credit, she begins to uncover truths about baby otters, environmental upheaval, and romantic crossed signals—not necessarily in that order. Her newfound karmic insights reveal how thin the line is between virtue and vanity, generosity and greed, love and hate . . . and fate.
My Star Rating:
My Review:
Instant Karma by Marissa Meyer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I loved this so much! This has been one of my most anticipated reads of 2020, so I was so honored to receive an audiobook ARC from the publisher on Netgalley. I devoured the whole thing in one day.
Prudence has the worst lab partner who’s always late and doesn’t seem at all interested in focusing on the assignment. When they receive a C on their group assignment, she begs for a chance to make the grade up and is granted to chance, but the catch is, it has to be done in true collaboration with her partner. He’s completely fine with the C and not at all interested in doing the assignment again.
That sets these two characters on an amazing summer of learning to work together, learning more about each other, and Prue gets to learn a whole lot more while volunteering for several weeks at a wildlife rescue nonprofit that Quint’s mother works at and Quint has been volunteering at for years.
There was also this thing that played a big part of the story, where Prue had a head injury that she believed gave her the ability to inflict “instant karma” on people she observed doing mostly bad but some good things.
What I loved so much about this book was how Prue got to learn that there are always other sides of a situation that may not be visible to others in the moment, or maybe ever, that when taken into consideration makes something that looks bad not seem so bad after all. You never know what other things might be at play, and I think that’s a lesson we could all stand to learn.
The romance between Prue and Quint was a hate to love, slow burn that I thought was done so well all the way around. There’s something so satisfying about a good hate to love romance when the story really lays the foundation and builds and builds and builds on it the way I felt this one did.
There was a lot of reference in this story to oceanic wildlife that to me was reminiscent of 50 First Dates, and that really took this story from good to great for me. Lots of rich detail. It seemed like a lot of research went into this book in that aspect. Also, for the record, this book was also a bit reminiscent to me of What You Wish For by Katherine Center.
As for the audiobook narration, I thought this was well done for a single narrator. Nothing detracted from the story at all.
Even though this was a YA romance, I do think readers of Contemporary Romance will enjoy this story, even if YA isn’t usually their cup of tea. I tend to prefer my YA to be fantasy when I do read YA, but I really just loved this one.