What if you could hear people's hearts — and travel to when they broke?
Seventeen-year-old Eli Santos from Silang, Cavite, has always been “too sensitive.” She feels colors — blue for lonely, yellow for giving, red for angry — in every heart she passes.
When her Lola Teresing gives her a strange brass watch left behind by a Japanese soldier in 1945, Eli discovers the family gift: for 180 seconds, the watch can take her to any year where a heart she loves was hurting.
1995: To sit with her Lola when she was abandoned and washing dishes alone.
2008: To sit with her own teenage mother, scared and pregnant on the bathroom floor.
1945: To sit in the mud with Hiroshi, an 18-year-old enemy soldier who chose to be kind in the middle of a war.
2035: To meet herself at 27 — a guidance counselor who has forgotten how to feel at all.
But when her best friend Mara gets a chance to leave for Canada for good, Eli must face the hardest lesson of all: Some hearts aren't meant to be kept. Some are meant to be let go — and trusted to find their way back across time.
HEART TIME (Oras ng Puso) is a magical realism coming-of-age story about empathy, inheritance, and the one thing even time can't break: yellow hearts that choose to stay warm.