I received this book for free from Reviewer Purchase in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

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.

Short and Sweet Review

It all starts with a science project and a bad grade. When Prudence gets a C on a joint project with Quint Erickson she’s upset, she did most of the work and doesn’t understand how things went wrong. The only chance Pru has to raise her grade is if she can get Quint to agree to redo it and if they actually work together. Pru is still upset with this and after going out with her friends to vent she wakes up the next day with the ability to have karma punish vandals and gossips. More often than not Pru’s new found powers end up backfiring when it comes to using them on Quint. For the science project redo, Pru joins Quint at the rescue center for sea animals.

When you read my synopsis of the plot above it looks like it’s all over the place and that’s because it’s a good representation of this book: a hot mess. Pru is one of the most unlikeable characters and she doesn’t get any better throughout the book, just when you think she’s growing she’s not. The thing about Pru is she’s always judging someone and her behavior towards Quint is horrible. She acts like she’s above Quint and he’s so beneath her and she doesn’t let him contribute because she thinks he’s not capable of doing anything when he is. Whenever someone served Pru’s bad attitude back to her I was loving it because she deserved it. The whole thing with the karma only happened like twice and was forgotten about in the end. I don’t think it was a magical power Pru had but just coincidence. Quint seems like a slacker but he’s actually been working at his moms rescue center and Pru being Pru thinks its a great idea to do their project based on the work of the center. Instead of letting Quint take the lead considering that he’s worked here most of his life Pru knowing nothing about sea animals thinks she needs to take charge. We see Pru and Quint work together to bring more awareness to the center and save some sea animals which was nice. I didn’t like the romance between these two I felt like it just happened because that’s what people would expect but with all the name calling and animosity that they had for each other I didn’t believe their romance.

Overall, I love Marissa Meyer but I would say this is her worst book and I blame that on Prudence. Prudence isn’t a character you want to cheer for, she’s one you want to strangle. I’m glad I read the companion novel first because if I started with this book I wouldn’t have wanted to read With a Little Luck. I would steer clear of this book and Pru’s bad energy.