Fiction: Fishing for Bacon by Michael Davie

I’m beginning to think that 2009 might well be remembered as the year that potential Canadian YA masterworks got lost in the waterfall of mainstream fiction.

First there was Alan Bradley’s lively but clearly juvenile The Sweetness of the Bottom the Pie (Doubleday Canada). Now comes Calgarian Michael Davies’ cheerfully abrupt Fishing for Bacon (Newest Press). The book features fresh-from-high school lost youth, Bacon Sobelowski who claims, almost from the very first, that he has bad timing. He gets stuck with the name “Bacon” during his birth, when his mother can think of nothing but her breakfast.

Afterward, when a nurse informed my mother that I was a boy, she curled around her pillow and sighed, “Bacon.” When the nurse asked her if she had a name for Baby Boy Sobelowski, my mother starred at the cold, grey wall and sniveled, “Bacon.”

The writing is crisp and sharp and though the story is somewhat thin, so is the book. While some of the theme’s are clearly adult, Bacon’s youthful verve would have been much tougher to resist in a slightly refocused package.