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Title: Suzi Sinzinnati: A Novel by Joe David Bellamy ISBN: 0-916366-56-1 Publisher: Pushcart Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1989 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)

Rating: 3
Summary: A quick, fun read
Comment: I stumbled onto this book in an unlikely way. I work at the rare book library at Yale, and we received a shipment of Bellamy's papers - including early drafts of this book - recently which I was charged with putting in order and filing. Slipping into pleasure reading is an occupational hazard in this job, and after browsing through the first few pages of Suzi Sinzinnati, I knew I'd be picking it up next time I was on Amazon. I don't regret it! Bellamy paints a spare but unsparing picture of young love, heartbreak, disappointment...and hope. Our hero is Moke, a college sophomore around 1960 whose high school sweetheart has dumped him recently and is soon engaged to a psychologist. (Yes, it's a bit cliched, but it works...) Home in Cincinnati for a brief summer visit, he drowns his sorrow in strip joints - and promptly falls for a young dancer who lends her stage name to the book. A whirlwind adventure ensues in which the girl and her mother (also in the business) follow Moke to his parents' new home in Florida, where his father is involved in what sounds like a borderline religious cult. This is what used to be the "real" Florida, before Disney World, Jimmy Buffett and beachfront condos (though all these changes are hinted at) and Bellamy does a first rate job of evoking this lost world. In fact, Moke's coming of age often seems to be intertwined with the foreshadowing of the changes that would take the world by storm in the coming decade. The fact that the reader knows what happened next to Moke's world adds to the tension in a wonderful way. What follows is the stuff of schoolboy fantasies, just real enough to be plausible, short but sweet before Moke has to head back to school and make his peace with both his past (the lost love) and his future (medical school, and whether he really wants it). The last few chapters are truly touching, and will keep you rooting for Moke to the end. There are a number of hilarious incidents along the way, including an episode in a Cincinnati library that will elicit a knowing laugh from anyone who has ever stumbled into an opposite-sex restroom, that lighten the mood as necessary but never divert your attention completely from Moke's growing pains. Not quite a classic, but I recommend it.