Ducks
Two Years in the Oil Sands
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4.7 • 31 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"An exceptionally beautiful book about loneliness, labor, and survival.“—Carmen Maria Machado
Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestselling cartoonist of Hark! A Vagrant, there was Katie Beaton of the Cape Breton Beaton, specifically Mabou, a tight-knit seaside community where the lobster is as abundant as beaches, fiddles, and Gaelic folk songs. With the singular goal of paying off her student loans, Katie heads out west to take advantage of Alberta’s oil rush—part of the long tradition of East Coasters who seek gainful employment elsewhere when they can’t find it in the homeland they love so much. Katie encounters the harsh reality of life in the oil sands, where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet is never discussed.
Beaton’s natural cartooning prowess is on full display as she draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, northern lights, and boreal forest. Her first full length graphic narrative, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton became a cult hero with her webcomic Hark! A Vagrant, but her first full-length graphic novel is something breathtakingly different. In 2005, Beaton was a 21-year-old college grad who left her home in the Canadian Maritimes, hoping to pay off her student debt by working in Alberta’s booming oil-sands industry. This thoughtful memoir captures everything she saw and felt for the two years she spent checking out tools to the workers in the fields. The job-related stuff alone is fascinating, not least because of Beaton’s graceful, expressive art. But soon, it becomes clear that the book has a deeper message about the faceless corporations profiting from those fields, who saw her and her fellow workers as just another resource to be exploited and abandoned. Ducks is an unsettling and occasionally difficult read, but Beaton’s empathy and humanity leap from even the darkest pages.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant) delivers a masterpiece graphic memoir: an immersive, devastating portrait of the two years she worked at Fort McMurray and nearby oil sands in northern Canada. In 2005, Beaton, 21 and desperate to pay off her student loans, left her small Nova Scotia town for the booming wilds of an oil operation in Alberta. The human and environmental toll of energy dependence are painstakingly recorded on her Heart of Darkness–like journey: facing relentless sexism and misogyny (she estimates that men outnumber women 50 to 1 at the camps), Beaton moves through a series of gigs—doling out wrenches at "tool cribs," desk work in the supply office—and acutely feels the object of intense scrutiny; the crass remarks are endless, and at one point men line up around the building to get a look at the new girl. When hundreds of ducks become caught in a hazardous waste "tailings pond" around the time a coworker dies on site, Beaton begins to connect individual and global consequences. While she documents her own traumas, Beaton also steps back to observe how the isolation can transform ordinary people, remarking, for instance, that hearing catcalls delivered in the familiar accent of her Cape Breton home region is especially cutting. The homespun drawings and intuitive pacing capture both the dreariness and occasional splendor of this frozen world, with flashes of the author's trademark humor in the banter between her crusty coworkers. Beaton 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.
