[1] Published by Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Books) in 2016 and featuring illustrations by Cree artist Kent Monkman, it was part of a collaborative effort to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Chanie's death.

[1] The book follows Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Ojibwe boy, as he escapes from a Northern Ontario residential school in the futile hopes of returning home to his family and two dogs.

This collaborative gesture was initiated by Canadian rock musician Gord Downie's brother, Mike Downie, who foregrounded an article by Ian Adams published in Maclean's in 1967 titled "The Lonely Death of Chanie Wenjack", documenting Chanie's escape from a residential school at the age of 12 and the subsequent discovery of his body by a set of train tracks.

[6] On October 22, 2016, imagineNATIVE hosted "A Night for Chanie", a special multimedia presentation of film, music, and performance related with a reading of the book by Boyden and introductory remarks by Senator Murray Sinclair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

[7] In an interview about the book, Boyden reflected that he "want[ed] us as Canadians to understand the fuller history of our country, to take it upon him or herself to learn beyond what you weren't taught in school.

John Bemrose of Maclean's described the book as "spellbinding," and "a novella that deftly suffuses Chanie's tragedy with traditional Aboriginal beliefs.

"[1] In conjunction with the release of Boyden's book and Gord Downie's Secret Path, a call for stories was put out by Maclean's for other runaways from residential schools.

[9] The Brock Press, a student newspaper of Brock University in Ontario, wrote that the novella "is short, but vast in its significance," claiming that it "continues to make strides in its telling of Wenjack's story, pushing for the history of residential schools, the attempts to destroy First Nations cultures and forced assimilation through violence and hate to be more widely viewed and discussed as a part of Canada's history.

Debbie Reese, an Indigenous author and researcher of Native-American portrayal in children's literature,[11] had an overall negative perception of Boyden's novella.

In a series of tweets a few months after the release of Wenjack, she criticizes Boyden's act as just one of many that "[make] Native ancestry … the centerpiece of who they are," and the belief that "they can speak/write of things they ought not.