Velorio is an ambitious, movingly lyrical debut novel from Xavier Navarro Aquino that looks at the real-life tragedy of Hurricane Maria's impact on Puerto Rico through a grief-soaked, phantasmagorical lens. The novel alternates between bitter despair and glimmers of hopefulness and community, reflecting on the extent to which Puerto Ricans feel abandoned and abused, both by their own government and by the rest of the world. Velorio begins soon after the hurricane subsides, when Camila finds that her sister, Marisol, has been killed by a mudslide. Camila sets off to find "the people that would return things back to how they were," taking the corpse of her sister, who Camila cannot believe is dead even as Marisol begins to decompose.
Marisol's fate is only a hint of the tragic strangeness to come, which draws multiple characters into the makeshift cult leader Urayoán's attempt to form a utopian community in the mountainous center of Puerto Rico. The effort is ominous from the start, with Urayoán employing bands of teenagers and children dressed in red, wearing black surgical masks, as his muscle. To Puerto Ricans feeling abandoned in the wake of the hurricane, all-too-accustomed to the island's metaphorical and physical decay, even Urayoán's twisted vision can seem like a viable alternative.
While Urayoán's paradise follows a familiar course, becoming increasingly violent and Hobbesian as the novel progresses, the prose is distinctive and dreamlike. Velorio has apocalyptic fires and savage violence, but its most powerful moments are the quiet, searching ones, where Navarro Aquino reflects on the island's history of being "taken and given like the final play in a losing game of dominoes." --Hank Stephenson, the Sun magazine, manuscript reader