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 ... While Urayoán's paradise follows a familiar course, becoming increasingly violent and Hobbesian as the novel progresses, the prose is distinctive and dreamlike. Navarro Aquino swaps characters and takes on their voices with graceful fluidity, moving from Urayoán's messianic prophecies to characters that punctuate their passages with scraps of poetry ... Navarro Aquino's gift is translating that historical pain into the turbulent inner lives of his characters, all struggling in their own, sometimes destructive, ways with their feelings of loneliness and abandonment.

As each character responds to the storm, the novel explores how a natural disaster can bring out both the best and worst in human nature ... Though the hurricane — referred to as Maria, la monstrua or simply she/her — strikes before Velorio opens, the storm itself is, in many ways, the main character of the story. On every page we are confronted with the devastation left in Maria’s wake ... As the characters attempt to make sense of the destruction, the narrative occasionally takes on a sort of concussed dreaminess ... At their best, these dreamlike sequences have a Murakami-esque flavor, albeit darker — here, the characters have surfaced from a bad dream, only to find themselves in a living nightmare ... From the beginning, Navarro Aquino establishes a visceral, lyric tone that frequently rises to a fever pitch ... Urayoán is positioned to be an equally complicated figure — he’s an idealistic, troubled cult leader who is grappling with government failure to respond to Maria, as well as the horrible echoes of colonialism ... Unfortunately, as the novel reaches its climax, Urayoán begins to resemble an almost comically villainous, one-dimensional plot device ... La monstrua could have been villain enough. In “Velorio,” Navarro Aquino, an incredibly talented young writer, is still finding his way.

Aquino sets a mood of charged and desperate hope ... Aquino mixes Spanish into the English text and stacks up details and characters, trusting the readers to engage with the world he creates, which is richer for all that is implied and unexplained. This is a demanding read that rouses high emotions and offers no simplistic resolutions.

In his experimentally structured debut novel, Velorio, Xavier Navarro Aquino makes important points about Puerto Rico, its history as a commonwealth of the United States and the catastrophic aftereffects of Hurricane Maria, which decimated the island in September 2017 ... Velorio is far from immobile, taking readers on a painful journey across the devastated island. Aquino addresses the situation using a wide range of voices and narrative styles. Drama is high as survivors fight to rebuild what they can salvage from the fury of nature and the incompetence of the powers that be ... Amid scenes of carnage and dialogue that incorporates Spanish idioms and Puerto Rican slang, the novel includes large swaths of poetry written by a visionary secondary character named Cheo. Some of the poems are only drafts, unfinished and abandoned. 'It’s my poetry and that’s what keeps us alive,' he tells the younger gang members. In this way, Velorio pays homage to Nobel Prize-winning Caribbean author Derek Walcott.

[An] elegiac and fervent ode to Puerto Rico that opens in the wake of 2017’s Hurricane Maria, as people grow increasingly desperate for food, water, and gasoline ... Graphic, unsettling scenes of animalistic violence orchestrated by Urayoán are studded with moments of emotional clarity and grace ... This lyrical and emotionally raw story will leave readers reflecting on the pain and promise of memory.