Favourite Books of 2022” —Barack Obama
“Notable Book of 2022” —New York Times
“New Yorker, Time, and Washington Post ” —Best Book of 2022
“Complex and unforgettable.” —TIME Top 100 Books of the Year
“The stories in this illustrated memoir are as gritty and harrowing as you might expect, but there’s humor here, too, as well as compassion and tenderness.” —New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022
“A monumental synthesis of history, politics, and herself… Ducks weaves Beaton’s own experiences with warm, humane portraits of the many people she met on the oil sands… 55,000 square miles [that are] a controversial locus of the Canadian economy, culture, and politics, a byword for both prosperity and environmental destruction.” —Kathryn VanArendonk, Vulture
“What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book.” —Rachel Cooke, The Guardian
“Epic. Kate Beaton headed west [to] one of the world’s most environmentally destructive oil operations, where workers lived in barracks-like camps and men vastly outnumbered women. Her experience there… gave her an insider’s view into a place and piece of Canadian history few outsiders ever see.” —Robert Ito, New York Times
“A serious, moving, and heartfelt piece of cartooning that is as kind as it is fearless. Easily one of the most impressive graphic novels of this year, or works of any kind in the past decade.” —Graeme McMillan, Wired
“[Ducks] blends her trademark wry humor with sharp social critique and raw personal experience.” —Dan Kois, Slate
“An exceptionally beautiful book about loneliness, labor, and survival. Beaton is a thoughtful guide through a complex landscape of class and gender, and these pages ache with grief and grace.” —Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
“Powerful and brilliant, this is easily the best graphic work I’ve read this year.” —Margaret Kingsbury, Buzzfeed Books
“Kate Beaton's exceptionally well-told and well-drawn graphic memoir… full of insights into human and environmental degradation, make[s] her a memoirist of the first rank."” —Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
“Candid and unflinching.” —Karla Strand, Ms Magazine
“Beaton left Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton at age 21 for an oil boom spurting a wealth of high-paying jobs that she could use to pay off her student loans. The place she finds is full of life and also hostile to it; a cabdriver warns her that a shadow population of workers live here, but they don’t live here. As Beaton settles into daily life in a tool shop, she begins to understand how that transience changes people, as well as her own complicity in the wholesale destruction of Indigenous land.” —Emma Alpern, Vulture
“In this hefty, sublime graphic novel/memoir, Beaton invites readers into a lonely, alien world just outside our own.” —Patrick Rapa, Philadelphia Inquirer
“What makes this the kind of book that you can’t stop thinking about is the empathy with which Beaton sees the world.” —Dustin Nelson, Thrillist
“Inside this dreary situation, she somehow finds humanity and even humor. It took Beaton about two years in the oil sands to pay down her loans; processing the experience took longer.” —Cat Auer, AV Club
“Ducks is both a coming-of-age narrative and a skillful, subtle commentary on class, misogyny, and the human costs of environmental extraction. From the oil fields to the hallways of worker housing, Kate Beaton’s comics are rich with quiet revelations, intimate details, and a deadpan, devastating sense of humor. A generous and illuminating book; I suspect it will stay on my mind for a very long time.” —Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley
“In Ducks, Kate Beaton doesn’t tell us how capitalism extracts, exploits, commodifies, and alienates. Nor does she show us. She recreates life in an oil sands mining operation in granular detail and allows us to make the connections ourselves—as she had to when she showed up to work there at age twenty-one. The effect is devastating. Despite the brutal toll Beaton suffered personally, she has woven from her experience a vast and complex tapestry that captures the humanity of people doing a kind of dirty work in which we are all complicit, and it shimmers with grace.” —Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
“Ducks is an unforgettable, riveting work. Kate Beaton opens the mind’s eye, allowing us to inhabit landscapes and experiences crucial to our time, yet largely unseen. Artful, considered and courageous, Ducks is a landmark work.” —Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing
“Ducks delivers an immersive, harrowing journey through an industry where the lure of fast money belies darker realities of casual brutality, profound loneliness and soul-cracking isolation. The uneasy echoes of Beaton’s story ring well past the the final page. Shattering.” —Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
“Katie Beaton’s graphic memoir about working in the oil sands of Alberta shares an experience that feels both alien and universal, desperate and yet somehow hopeful. Frame by frame, it weaves together a complex tale about capitalism, environmental degradation, misogyny, Indigenous rights, and the lengths that some people have to go to for a fighting chance at a good life. Honest, compassionate, and clear-eyed, Ducks is a stunning achievement in storytelling that I will be thinking about for a long time.” —Jung Yun, O Beautiful
“Beaton's graphic memoir of her time working in the oil patch is a vital and revelatory Canadian story, vividly told. The staggering scope of the industry and its notoriously harsh impact on the landscape of northern Alberta provide a loud, lurid backdrop. But this is fundamentally a deeply personal story, and Beaton unveils her experiences in this tough and relentlessly misogynistic work environment with a fair but unflinching eye, telling hard truths about the very mixed blessings of living and working in a boomtown.” —Chris Turner, The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands
“A masterpiece graphic memoir [that] makes a shattering statement on the costs of ignorance and neglect endemic in the fuel industry, in both powerful discussions of its sociopolitical ramifications and her own keenly observed personal story.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“A fascinating, harrowing, unforgettable book about a place few outsiders can comprehend.” —Kirkus, Starred Review
“This is graphic memoir at its finest.” —Booklist, Starred Review
“An unflinchingly honest coming-of-age memoir and unforgettable depiction of capitalism’s dehumanizing effect on the individual.” —Library Journal
06/01/2022
A coming-of-age graphic memoir from Beaton (King Baby), best known for her decade-long webcomic Hark! A Vagrant. After graduating from college burdened with student debt in 2005, a then-21-year-old Beaton left her hometown of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to embark upon what eventually became a two-year stint working a mining job in Northern Canada's Athabasca oil sands, a huge petroleum deposit underneath and surrounded by vast boreal forest just below the arctic tundra. This graphic novel is an account of Beaton's experiences in the oil sands, where her first job is as a tool crib attendant, in charge of distributing hardware while enduring a constant barrage of crude remarks, catcalling, and obvious objectification from her male coworkers. As she moves between job sites and positions, she discovers that sexism and misogyny run rampant in the fuel industry (where men outnumber women 50-to-1) and that filing a harassment complaint will only get her admonished for expecting special treatment. As this detailed memoir progresses, Beaton encounters a succession of idiosyncratic employees who open her eyes to the physical and mental tolls of performing grueling labor in harsh condition. She also comes to understand the environmental havoc wreaked by fossil fuel dependence, but it's her depiction of how a victim of long-term abuse internalizes their trauma so thoroughly that they lose any sense of their own worth, that lingers beyond the last page. VERDICT An unflinchingly honest coming-of-age memoir and unforgettable depiction of capitalism's dehumanizing effect on the individual.
★ 2022-05-25
An ambitiously complex graphic narrative of a Nova Scotian woman’s experience working in the oil sands of Fort McMurray, Alberta.
Known primarily as the creator of the web-based comic series “Hark! A Vagrant,” Beaton moves to memoir with this examination of the two years she spent working in the oil sands to pay off her student loans. The author begins with an introduction to her home in Cape Breton, where the people have “a deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently they will have to leave it to find work somewhere else. This push and pull defines us. It’s all over our music, our literature, our art, and our understanding of our place in the world.” On the surface, the book is a chronicle of the three years following the author’s college graduation (she also spent a year working at the Maritime Museum of British Columbia), but Beaton captures much more than her personal story. She delves deep into the milieu of Fort McMurray, highlighting the complex relationships among the work camps, the oil companies, and the people living and working there. As the author recounts her time through several jobs, companies, and locations, she alternates the narration between the daily grind of the workers and the vistas of startling beauty surrounding them. She introduces each section by location and includes a list of the characters by job and home province, and she is careful to incorporate issues related to the local Indigenous peoples. After all, she writes, “the oil sands operate on stolen land.” Beaton captures numerous poignant, sometimes heartbreaking moments throughout the book, but the cumulative effect of her many stories is even more impressive. She creates an indelible portrait of environmental degradation, fraught interpersonal relationships among a workforce largely disconnected from home, and greedy corporations that seem only vaguely aware of the difficult work’s effect on their employees.
A fascinating, harrowing, unforgettable book about a place few outsiders can comprehend.
