Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (Hardcover)

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"A vast and fascinating book, Ducks is a crucial turning point in the career of an important artist."—Etelka Lehoczky, NPR

"Ducks... is a rebuttal to hierarchies of silence, an attempt to draw attention to forms of suffering that are easier to ignore."—Sam Thielman, The New Yorker

"Kate Beaton's new masterpiece just rewrote the standard for graphic memoirs."—Rob Salkowitz, Forbes

“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 fierce, thoughtful and revealing memoir about the Albertan oil industry, which puts money in the pockets of workers... and petrol in car tanks but leaves great scars on both the landscape of northern Canada and the people who staff its giant machines and equipment rigs."—Guardian Best Graphic Novels of 2022

"Ducks is a bruising and intimate account of survival and exploitation—of both the land and the people who worked on it—and is brought to life by Beaton’s immersive illustrations. In unveiling her plight, Beaton makes stunning observations about the intersections of class, gender, and capitalism."—TIME Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2022

"In a deeply beautiful way, Ducks offers a nuanced perspective on a place and industry that fuels much of Canada but that many of us know very little about. However, it also goes beyond that, presenting a deeply moving picture of humanity in general: lonely, disillusioned and, ultimately, redemptively compassionate."—Globe and Mail Top 100

"Ducks [is] a humane profile of struggling workers, the sorts who produce sneakers, smartphones and fossil fuels but remain faceless."—Chicago Tribune Best Books of 2022

“A monumental synthesis of history, politics, and herself… Ducks weaves Beaton’s own experiences withwarm, 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

"Full of the insight of hindsight and the sorrowful anger of the young working class, Ducks triumphs in its honesty.”—LIBER a Feminist Review

“A masterpiece, a heartbreak, a nightlight shining in the dark.”—Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

"Some of the most powerful personal stories take on the most important shared stories humans are trying to tell, solve, and set down. Kate Beaton's first full length graphic novel narrates her own story working in the oil sands, and also our shared economic and climate story."—NPR The Spark

“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

“Beaton’s comics memoir subtly encompasses the quiet and unassuming tragedies that mark our present moment.”—Wyatt Sarafin, The Brooklyn Rail

“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

"[A] soulful masterwork." — Washington Post

"[Ducks is] like the corpus of folk songs and tales from Cape Breton: a collection of small stories and anecdotes about working people, each made more meaningful by its proximity to others." — London Review of Books

"Beaton shows the humanity of workers of all genders in the oilsands, and how workplaces can rob us of that humanity."—Kendall Anderson, Edmonton Journal

"Ducks is a remarkable glimpse into the fraught and under-explored daily lives of the people who work in one of Canada’s most contentious industries."—Quill & Quire