Here, from the author of Greenhouse, is an ironic

picaresque novel that combines the high-spirited

Romanticism of Cervantes with the biting satire

of Orwell.

The year is 2013. As the teeming population of

Central America pushes up against the Southern

borders of the United States, seeking relief from

the sweltering heat of the "greenhouse effect" and

its accompanying drought and famine, a half-dozen

new states secede from the Union in order to work

out their separate destinies. One such state is Mil-

waukee, an Edenic island of prosperity preserved

by the old-fashioned values and low technology es-

poused by its rotund, "backward-thinking" governor.

Escape to Milwaukee is foremost in the minds of

Rico, a young artist whose talent is yet unrealized,

and Pooch, a frustrated radical devastated by

the loss of his family in the famine. Together, they

make their way through one of the many tunnels

that honeycomb the Rio Grande Wall, finally arriv-

ing in their Utopia, which turns out to be something

more, and less, than anything they had ever imagined.

With an inventiveness that manages, with its

twists and turns, to keep the reader properly off-

balance, Dakota James paints in Milwaukee the

Beautiful a stunning portrait of a twenty-first cen-

tury America forced to come to grips with the ex-

cesses that have sustained it.