This lucid, vulnerable, and perfectly balanced graphic memoir weaves sharp moments of humor with a masterfully captured feeling of homesickness, illuminating the generational trauma of economic disinvestment as well as the cost-both human and environmental-of the fossil fuel industry. 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. Carefully detailed aerial views of dig sites are haunting visual pauses as Beaton discovers what she can-and can’t-bear as she tries to make a life for herself. There, she meets other Atlantic-coast Canadians in search of well-paying work, catches on quickly to her job distributing tools, and experiences both tender moments of real connection and thoughtless cruelty from her coworkers. Ducks, as it is now, as true and whole a Ducks as we will see, is dark. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is more than a memoir, its also an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural.

Beaton opens with a cut-to-the-quick truth about her home in Nova Scotia: “there is no knowing Cape Breton without knowing how deeply ingrained two diametrically opposed experiences are: a deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently we have to leave it to find work somewhere else.” Burdened with student-loan debt, Beaton decides to pay it off quickly by working in Alberta, where oil extraction is big business. Ducks, as it was, is sad and funny and poignant and altogether human. But the Beaton you know and love is undoubtedly here, from wry moments of comedy to her deceptively simple line work. Beaton is beloved for her hilarious short comics ( Hark! A Vagrant!2011) and sweetly maniacal picture books ( The Princess and the Pony, 2015), so this graphic memoir, about working in the oil sands of Alberta, might seem out of left field. The book is not about ducks, but they represent a manifestation of the damage to the environment in Alberta, Canada, where Beaton was living and working.

Ducks two years in the oil sands review