Instant Karma

Instant Karma is a young adult novel by Marissa Meyer, published in 2020. It is a contemporary story with one fantastic element in it, and it is set in the coastal town where its narrator lives and goes to school.

Prudence is quick to judge the lazy, the rude and the arrogant, and she gets her wish for karmic justice when the ability to cast instant karma on the people around her arrives without warning. She uses it cheerfully on public vandals and gossips alike, and finds that it will not work on Quint, who is annoyingly attractive and, as she keeps noticing, decent: he spends his time at the local rescue centre for sea animals.

The connection between them comes from the rescue centre, where Prudence ends up working for extra credit and where she starts to learn something about baby otters, about what is happening to the coast, and about the signals she has been misreading. The novel follows her as the power she has been given turns out to be less straightforward than a way of punishing people.