REVIEW: Instant Karma by Marissa Meyer

Instant Karma follows our main character named Prudence. Prudence has a twin brother named Jude and they are best friends with a girl named Ari who goes to a different school than the twins do. The Twins were named after the songs from the beatles and their family owns a record store and this is how they met the musically talented Ari. We start our story by meeting Prudence in school whilst she is waiting for her always late and obnoxious lab partner, Quint, to do their presentation and of course he is late once again. She can’t stand this and he puts her school academic reputation on the line when she is forced to do all of the group work by herself. After school, Prudence, Jude and Ari go to their local hang out which is a restaurant bar where they know the owner. In order to bring more people into the restaurant, the owner brought in somebody to do karaoke and so when somebody else puts her name forward to sing, she does it with a pout on her face but finds herself beginning to like it. She sings the song instant karma by the beatles and as soon as she finishes her song, she slips over and bangs her head which knocks her out. When she wakes, she finds that she has the power to cast instant karma. She starts small by punishing those who do bad things but finds herself unable to cast bad karma on Quint.

When she gets a B minus on the assignment and Quint gets a B, she asks him to do the assignment over the summer as a make-up. He disagrees and tells her how much of a pain it has been to even work with her this entire year. But Prudence won’t let it go. She is determined to do this assignment with or without him even if her teacher doesn’t allow her to. So she reads his paper that was his extra credit and decides to go to the place that he wrote about, the marine animal shelter. She is stunned to realise that his mother is the person who runs the place and that he even works there. He is pissed about her coming to his sacred place and she asks if she can volunteer, Quint immediately says no but his mother admits that they are short-handed due to a punishment that she doled out on a volunteer. So Quint makes a bargain with her, if she volunteers, he will do the assignment with her. They both agree to these terms. Although they dislike each other at the beginning of the book, throughout the novel, they begin to become closer to each other by helping out the centre by fundraising money as the centre has money issues and the funding that is given by the government doesn’t quite reach all of the issues that it needs to cover. So Quint and Pru devise a plan to help both the centre and get the grade that Pru wants.

This book was light and fluffy in comparison to Marissa Meyer’s other books. I have loved her previous books so I wanted to definitely try out her new venture into contemporary but with a twist. I really did love the idea of blending young adult contemporary with something different and Marissa provided that. I will say though, that since my reading of this book, commentary has come out that Instant Karma is not a thing but I think maybe perhaps Marissa Meyer just wanted the concept of wishing something upon someone rather than the idea of instant karma itself but had no idea what to call it and also drew inspiration from the actual song as well. Either way, this isn’t something for me to comment much on as I do not know much about the ins and outs of this but I will say, if you want a light and cute read to cheer you up from a reading slump, this is definitely it.

3 out of 5 stars.