#buqoya

What About Today

by Dawn Lanuza

Aiden's stuck working for his family's amusement park, Funtastic World, for the whole summer. Nothing amuses him, until he met this terrified girl. 

Gemma's stuck in Funtastic World thinking she could handle the park's rides. She couldn't. Good thing she met someone to guide her.

As the day comes to a close, Aiden and Gemma ask themselves if one day is ever enough to decide if they were better off as friends or strangers.

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As a child, there were weeks wherein I’d collect stacks and stacks of old newspapers from neighbors and sari-sari stores near our house for the annual newspaper drive at school. Competition was really fierce. You could sense it in the way students would try to sneak a peek inside your homeroom classroom to see how huge of a “lead” or “deficit” their class has over the others. I don’t know if the…

When Cocoy Became Kikay

by C.P. Santi

Cocoy’s not-so-secret dream is to one day become a gun-toting, ass-kicking secret agent. But she has another dream—and this time, even her best friends don’t have a clue—she dreams of being with someone.  

Problem is, she finds out that Jaime Arguelles—a.k.a. the guy she’d been secretly crushing on for years—likes girls who... well... like pink.  To Cocoy’s logical mind, there’s only one solution: it’s time to go girly. After all, how hard can it be?

On the Outside Looking In

by Claire Du

Seventeen-year-old Freya Mahilum has always been in love with football hotshot Ezra Montelibano. Ezra, who’s too caught up with family pressures and his so-called girlfriend to pay attention to a geek obsessed with him. Freya knows she’d never stand a chance with him, but then fate conspires to bring them together. Will getting to know each other prove that love knows no boundaries or will they find that they’re better off existing in two separate worlds?

I don’t understand what’s going on. Around forty-eight days ago, I was so pumped about this #StrangeLit plunny, I even felt the urge to flood Rix’s Twitter DM because of it. But now, two weeks into the class and I still have a blank manuscript. Sure, I got distracted by a little #TalesFromTheMetro, but that shouldn’t have kicked my plunny away. I have been plotting and outlining all this time and…

(First totally unrelated note – I see what you did there, author. I do. And it is priceless. Basically – try saying the author’s name out loud. Go on. I’ll be waiting.)

(Also, another note – it is four o’ clock in the morning upon the time of my writing this. Please forgive me for anything I might be getting wrong.)

He looked deep into her eyes, and her breath caught. “You were starting to smell,” he said gravely. And just like that, the spell was broken as she laughed and whacked him on the arm. “I did not!”

It all started with a thunderstorm that never let up.

Kris Mercado and Noel Abad are two people from very different places (even literally – she’s a Manila girl and he’s a Pasig boy) and very different places in society (Noel’s family is loaded, Kris…well, not so much), and they probably wouldn’t have met if it weren’t for the fact that it’s flooding like crazy in Davao and there’s only one room left unoccupied in the only hotel for miles.

Circumstances being what they are, they end up rooming together, and come out from the experience with more than they ever imagined.

If there’s one thing I liked about these two it was that although it’s undeniable that they had immediate chemistry (physically, at least – both of them thought the other was attractive shortly after their first meeting), and got along with each other, they never really rushed into anything. They were comfortable with being friends, exchanging jokes and sass…until their time runs out and they’re forced to admit to each other – and most of all, to their own selves – that yeah, there’s something between them, something that could blossom into something more.

Also, Kris’ little bit about wanting to be someone who can take care of herself is something I can relate with on a personal level, honestly. Not to the extent where I also snap at people who try to care for me out of the blue, though, but I do understand how the feeling of being not in charge of your own fate does suck – it’s like you’re a puppet with your strings cut (damn, that was too poetic, wasn’t it), and dealing with her problems towards that kind of situation is a really big thing about Kris as a character and as a person. In the end, it’s nice to see how she deals with that side of her and the side of Noel that just wants to let her be taken care of, once in a while.

This is something that extends to her viewpoint with traveling – like I said in my second review for the #BuqoYA fourth story bundle, it’s a natural urge for human beings to want to belong somewhere. She admits to that being a huge driving factor behind her travels, and I like how she manages to do it without, again, her family not being as wealthy as Noel’s family is – truly, when there’s a will, there’s a way, and I like how she manages to juggle that and her studies and guarding her family’s collective back. With that work ethic, she’s a girl who’s got greater things waiting for her in the future, and I can only guess what her future has up next for her.

It’s not really a perfect story – nothing really ever is – what with that one bit in the middle that gave me war flashbacks to college Gen Psych classes, and the sudden and yet utterly inevitable ‘ex as conflict’ scene, but what I liked about this story was that it admits that life, like anything else, really isn’t a fairytale. Kris and Noel had a lovely handful of days together, sure, but is this really what they want? Not just a sudden haze of cabin fever? Is this…thing between them really something worth taking a risk for?

They find out the answer for themselves in the end, and, despite everything I’ve said and not said in the course of this review, A Moment Like This is definitely something worth reading.

Rating: 4/5

(Excerpt of this story soon to follow, as well as, well, the blog tour banner itself, 'cuz I’m currently posting this on tumblr mobile, which isn’t letting me insert pictures here, among other things. Damn.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sue Donymko lives and works in Manila, Philippines. When not writing or working, or working some more, she eats, watches a lot of television, sings - much to the neighbors’ dismay - and reads until she falls asleep. Blog | Twitter

Interested in getting this collection of short stories for yourself? Here’s the purchase link to it on Buqo!

PERFECT MOMENTS

Sometimes you’ll meet your match: at detention, on the badminton court, in a resort hotel in Davao, at a lab, in a foster home, at an epic party. You’ll never know. But always keep your heart ready for that perfect moment. Read these stories and experience the bliss of first love.

A Moment Like This by Sue Donymko

Kris Mercado and Noel Abad are trapped in a posh resort hotel in…