Fledglings

Project Wild One
by Louise Sidley

Leaside: Red Deer Press, 2025
$14.95 / 9780889957633

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic

*

Before COVID-19, ARCs were part of any book reviewer’s experience. Publishers produced a small run of these Advance Reading Copies—printed on stock office paper, often not proofread, lacking cover art, emblazoned with ‘Not for Resale’—so that, the idea went, a reviewer would finish the book, slap together the review, and submit the piece to their editor well before the finished version made its official public appearance in bookstores months later. With luck and no small effort, the review could run on the same week the book was released.

Perfectly hygienic and virtually cost-free, PDF files of books, occasionally called e-ARCs, became the standard during the pandemic. They’ve remained the format of choice since then, especially for smaller publishers, which can substantially save on both postage and printing costs.

Reading digital files, I’ve noticed, has one unexpected consequence. It’s private, intensely so. 

No one, literally nobody, asks what I’m reading. It could be The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage, Of Grammatology (that bible of my graduate student years), or Industrial Society and Its Future (aka, The Unabomber Manifesto) and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference, as nobody would know. Without a cover that broadcasts a title and author’s name, the flat grey reading pad rebuffs outsider eyes and discourages friendly inquiries. 

“A new Atwood?” a stranger might have once asked. Now, I’m simply left alone. And, somehow, everyone understands that probing a stranger about what they’re reading on their device is a faux pas—a crass invasion of privacy, at worst, and, at minimum, an act that reveals someone who’s clueless about personal boundaries.

All of this is to say that over the hours I spent with Project Wild One, not a soul asked me what I was reading. Faced with silence, I imagined an answer to the question I used to hear regularly: “What’s it about?” “Well, it’s about a boy who rescues a duck he names Wild One” is the answer I gave to myself. (Yes, back in the day I was a kid with an “overactive imagination.” As a child today, no doubt, I’d be diagnosed with some malady or other and medicated.)

On the surface that answer is true. A debut YA novel, Project Wild One recounts exactly that. Out fishing with his father, pre-teen Robbie Randall is excited to spot a hen and her string of ducklings. A pair of racing yahoos on jet skis manage to orphan one of the ducklings and Robbie decides he’ll save it (her, he soon discovers). Once home, Robbie has to figure out how to feed and care for her; as Wild One ages, Robbie realizes that she needs to (a) fly and (b) join a flock that will head south for the winter. 

Urban kids with screens aplenty and a love for Minecraft, Angry Birds, or Splatoon may find the book a touch old school. Project Wild One might not speak to their reality: Robbie and his mom, dad, and sister, live in a small—“puny,” Robbie’s sarcastic older sister Laura decides—cabin “far from town”; the kids aren’t allowed to have cellphones. Even TV seems out of the picture. For them, there’s weeding and other chores, not to mention a lake to play in and around. 

Adventures, whether fishing, catching sight of a snapping turtle, or sleeping in a tent are pretty low-key; the book’s pacing is leisurely; and for the Angry Birds set, the lack of explosions and constant movement might be a deterrent to these young brains that are accustomed to hyperactivity.  

Then again, parents who might consider the book—and look at reviews—will soon realize that, really, Project Wild One is about a boy’s “moral education”—a phrase I associate with a long line of novels that stretches back to Goethe (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre of 1795, in fact, which I picture as being so obscure to children in 2025 that it might as well exist as a papyrus scroll in a cave near the Dead Sea).

Basically, Robbie’s adventures over two summers are about personal evolution. And with an appealingly subtle hand, Rossland author Louise Sidley embeds a lot of Robbie’s maturation in the everyday of these adventures. 

Along the way, for instance, he learns about the world and about himself; and, maybe most importantly, he learns about what’s truly important to him (and worth fighting for) and about how to make things happen. Like other adult titles readers might know and appreciate—Miriam Toews’ Fight Night, Zalika Reid-Benta’s Frying Plantain, Carrianne Leung’s That Time I Loved You—in this Bildungsroman a protagonist’s experiences in the world and responses to them help shape their character.

Robbie also learns about family dynamics and rules (and consequences). His activities lead him to the contradictory facets of other people (and himself) and to witness the difference between privilege and its absence. 

As he faces challenges related to Wild One and Peeper, a domesticated duck his father buys him, Robbie begins to understand agency (and lack thereof) and his own abilities (and those yet to develop); and he begin to see the necessity of understanding complex, stratified ideas—the kind that adults wrestle with every day. Sidley’s gift is to weave all these formative phases and steps into a simple-seeming story about a boy and his fledgling ducks. She resists the temptation to draw attention to a Big Theme. 

Much of Robbie’s development is accelerated by the challenges of Wild One as well as by the unexpected arrival of his crusty grandfather, who is a hunter. He’s a man who knows “a lot about killing things,” Robbie observes. Averse to hunting (fish, to start, and later ducks), Robbie initially see his grandfather as a powerful foe. As the book winds down, Robbie is faced with another conundrum, in the form of an angry-sounding neighbour who wants to redevelop his property’s road access in such a way as to affect the pond Wild One calls home.

With a new friend (a memorably-drawn private school kid, a sophisticate who says “Pray tell”) and the occasional counsel from his sister, parents, and grandfather, Robbie solidifies as a character with values and politics. As though a much-delayed response to Harlan Ellison’s horrific, dystopia-set A Boy and His Dog (1969), Sidley’s tale—of a boy and his ducks—is a civic story that highlights the halting steps toward adult responsibility and citizenship. Young readers will intuit some of that as they learn about the plusses and minuses and potential heartache of having a pet.

An editor at BCR, Brett Josef Grubisic resides on Salt Spring Island. His fourth and fifth novels were reviewed by BCR. [He’s recently written about books by K.J. Denny (ed.), Sonali Zohra, Carrie Anne Vanderhoop, Kristen Pendreigh, Sam Wiebe, Maureen Young, Daniel Anctil, and Adam Welch for BCR.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” –E.M. Forster