Availability:
Library | Call Number | Format | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Braintree Thayer Public Library | B BEATON | BOOK | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Searching... Hanover John Curtis Free Library | B BEATON | BOOK | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Searching... Milton Public Library | GNNF B BEATON, K. BEA | BOOK | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Searching... Rockland Memorial Library | A-GN B BEATON | BOOK | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Searching... Scituate Town Library | BIOG. BEATON BEA 2022 | BOOK | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Searching... Sharon Public Library | B BEATON, KATE | BOOK | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Searching... Walpole Public Library | GN G-920 BEAT 2022 | BOOK | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Searching... Weymouth Tufts Library | BEATON, K. (GN) | BOOK | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Notable book! One of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2022! Winner of Canada Reads 2023!
"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.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Company. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
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. But the Beaton you know and love is undoubtedly here, from wry moments of comedy to her deceptively simple line work. 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. 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. 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. 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. This is graphic memoir at its finest.
Library Journal Review
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.