"This is a great, funny, loopy novel--it's like spending the weekend happily cooped up with two girls named Hazel and Sonya in a perfectly seedy downtown hotel, reading Kinsey, and listening to the Shangra-las, the Jaynettes, and the Dixie Cups."
--Frederick Barthelme

"Joe David Bellamy has written a saucy, satirical love story in which the erotic is portrayed with levity, the satire with good-natured restraint, and the romance with comic realism."
--Phil Hanrahan, Milwaukee Journal

"Bellamy has created a heroine of wise innocence and irresistible sexuality. O Suzi! Sweet and dangerous Suzi!" --Robley Wilson

"Highly effective deadpan humor...this sexy romp featuring quirkily engaging and thoroughly human characters...is likely to disarm and cheer its readers."
--Publishers Weekly

"Joe David Bellamy is a writer blessed with perfect pitch--he possesses a wonderful knack for capturing precisely and humorously the rhythms of ordinary speech and emotions. Bellamy's humor grows out of his uncanny ability to capture the dreams, foibles, and phrasings that make these characters so convincingly human. Suzi Sinzinnati is a pleasure."
--Laurie Alberts, Albuquerque Journal

"This novel captures a generation tilting over the edge into the new world, the world we still inhabit today. And capturing us there, it takes us back and makes us wonder, wonder: Who wrote the Book of Love?"
--Elizabeth Inness-Brown, St. Petersburg Times

"The irresistible heroine of this gently comic novel is a burlesque artist who flouts convention along with her halter tops and brings love, maybe even redemption, to Moke Galenaille, a doubtful pre-med on the rebound from romance and his father's glib promptings toward 'money grubbing.' An easily readable story with characters one can smile at even when one shouldn't--like the dubiously wealthy Baptist minister Elijah Roark--this novel is as much about Moke's college struggles--the usual mad dorm mates, library lust, and missed exams--as about the irrepressible Suzi. This novel won Pushcart's Seventh Annual Editors' Book Award for a manuscript of 'enduring literary value....'"
--Library Journal

"Bellamy earns your credulity by virtue of the loveliness of his writing, his light humor, and his perfectly pitched dialogue."
--Sarah Gold, Cleveland Plaindealer

"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.... 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 (his 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.... I recommend it." --David A. Bede, Amazon.com