Aaaand episode 3 is up! This one is an excerpt from Blast from Two Pasts by Kristel S. Villar. Here you will meet the sexy-swearing Lucas Lobregat (that is not a spoiler, I swear), read by Gio Gahol, and Cara, read by Rachel Coates. Who is Lucas Lobregat, you ask? Continue Reading
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 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?
With the help of her friends, Cocoy embarks on a pink-tinged journey that somehow turns her neat and orderly life upside down. But it’s all good—because in the midst of her blossoming relationship, Cocoy learns a whole lot about life, love, dreams, and friendship . . . and about the healing power of pan de sal, Chippy, and Nutella.
***
The title threw me off just a little, to be honest. I thought it’s a story of a young boy who wanted to physically become a girl. Turns out that while that would be a very interesting story, When Cocoy Became Kikay tells a completely different tale of a teenage girl’s transformation.
Cocoy is one of the boys, and she is happy in her skin, thank you very much. That is, until she falls in crush with the one and only Jaime Arguelles, the boy next door who prefers girls who wear pink and maybe a tiny bit of lipgloss. To get him to even see her as a girl, Cocoy felt she needed to start looking like one for a start, and thus begins her adventure.
Some of the turns in the book felt familiar, not because they were annoyingly predictable, but because Cocoy felt like someone I knew, or maybe someone I’ve been at one point in my (definitely less colorful) adolescence. Santi writes the character as if Cocoy is someone she loves, someone she roots for, and that is palpable in the narrative. The inside of Cocoy’s head is a bright, funny place, and I love being inside of it. The ending was a topic of discussion for me and my friend, but it felt right to me. It felt deserved and comforting, just like a spread of pandesal, Chippy, and Nutella on a bad day.
When Cocoy Became Kikay is available on Amazon. Print copies are available too! Just contact the author 🙂
About the Author
C.P. Santi is a Filipina writer based in Tokyo, Japan. She is a wife to an engineer / musician / jokester and a full-time mom to two energetic boys. She loves cooking and feeding people, gorging on chocolate, watching J-doramas, belting it out in the karaoke box, and running around the house playing tickle tag. She also loves dreaming up stories about the people she meets.
In another life, she is also an architect and academic.
C. P. Santi blogs about writing and creative stuff at http://thejapayukichronicles.blogspot.jp. You can also view her other works in progress at http://www.wattpad.com/user/cpsanti
For 20-year old Kyle Thomson, nothing in the world is more terrifying than the prospect of telling Allison Jeon that he loves her. That is, until he finds out that this mystical café in a peculiar place called Nowheretown had served her a cup of afforgeto—a brew for forgetting—a drink she ordered intending to forget him. Hoping to reverse the spell, Kyle reluctantly teams up with a bunny-eared hopeless romantic and a badass barista to retrieve Allison’s memory jar from the Repository of the Intangible. But when stealing back forgotten memories doesn’t quite turn out as expected, Kyle is left with no choice but to conquer his biggest fear.
Can the magic of Nowheretown supply him a fixer-upper, or will the magic in his steadfast heart be enough to grant them their happy ever after?
***
This is my first Frejas book, and reading it pretty much sealed the deal that she will be on my auto-buy list from here on out. The author is born to write urban fantasy, as proven by her debut effort, Paper Planes Back Home (but that’s a different review altogether). The depth of her imagination grabs you from the first page. It feels real and magical at the same time, and it’s the kind of strong pull that moves you to turn the page, to hungrily go through each word and navigate through each plot twist.
The Forget You Brew starts with the common enough quandary of a boy who felt he could never confess his love to a girl. It’s the kind of self-inflicted problem that makes me want to knock Kyle and Allison‘s head together to drive some sense into them. But factor in the fantastical world beyond the thick wall of bushes that is Nowheretown, a very helpful girl with bunny ears, a really hot barista in a motorcycle brewing exactly the kind of magical drink you need, and you’ve got a whirlwind of a story. Personally (and this is a topic for debate), the afforgeto is not my kind of brew, but I understand its intoxicating lure. And if you make the right decision to pick up this story, I’m sure you will too. Did I mention the barista is hot? Okay.
The Forget You Brew is part of the StrangeLit Killer Seasons bundle available on Buqo. Paperback copies are available direct from the author.
NEWS: Frejas is working on another book set in the Nowheretown universe and I can’t wait to read that!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Tara Frejas is a cloud-walker who needs caffeine to fuel her travels. By day, she works in project management and events, and she writes down her daydreams at night. She began publishing fiction for public consumption in 2004, posting her pieces on various online channels like fan forums and Blogspot, eventually exploring other avenues like Livejournal, Soomp!, Tumblr, and most recently, Wattpad.
Aside from her obvious love affair with words and persistent muses, Tara is very passionate about being caffeinated, musical theatre, certain genres of music, dancing, dogs, good food, and romancing Norae, her ukelele. She owns a 6-month-old male bunny named Max who sometimes tries to nibble on her writing notes.
Paper Planes Back Home is her first novel.
One day, author Katrina Ramos Atienza tweeted about a romance writing playlist that keeps her going when she’s in her writer’s hole. I took the bait, we fangirled a bit (ehem, Alex Turner), and then she so kindly shared her Spotify playlist link to the Twitterverse. A few months and many track contributions later, her playlist has swelled to 30+ songs and it’s still growing. I list my 15 favorites below (since 2015 is wrapping up and it’s the season of year-end lists), in no particular order. Feelings may vary depending on the weather, or the availability of chocolates in the vicinity. Continue Reading
So remember at FilReadercon when we had theater actors Rachel Coates and Gio Gahol read excerpts of our romance books? Remember we said we’re launching a podcast to follow through with that soon? Well the first episode is up! YAY! This first one is an excerpt from Fall Like Rain by Ana Tejano, wherein Gio reads Mark, and Rachel reads Rain. Read a bit more about the book below before you hit play:
Rain De Castro has been in love with her best friend, Mark Velasco, for almost the entire time she has known him, but she’s clearly in the friend zone because he’s happily in a relationship. Or so she thought, until the news of his break-up reaches her. Now that Mark’s single again, she decides that it’s time to get out of the zone. But when her cousin Lissa comes into the picture and sets her eyes on Mark, Rain feels troubled when he gets a little too friendly with her. Rain is determined to fight for what she feels this time, but is it worth the effort if it’s a losing battle from the start? Will she back off to give way for her best friend’s happiness, even if it means losing him to someone else again?
Ready? Great! Don’t forget to subscribe to the #romanceclass YouTube channel after watching, okay? Because more live readings are coming up including one for my book Songs of Our Breakup! Oh, and scroll down after the video because we’ve got a raffle for you guys too <3 Continue Reading
They say you will always remember your first time, and that holds so much truth for me and my very first Filipino Readercon. I arrived halfway into the festivities but just in time to catch all the good stuff. I tried to make it simple for myself by limiting my goals to just three: Continue Reading
