★★★★★ 5
An amazing, if sometimes dark, memoir of work, solitude, and taking a pragmatic path in life.
Format: Hardcover
What do you do, when your only viable financial prospects are to move to even more remote, cold, dark and desolate land where you are part of a corporate mining operation dredging sands for valuable resources, living onsite in a company owned dormitory? Beaton recalls all this in her memoir of her post-university time, where she was faced with this decision to either live and work the oil sands, or face a life of financial bondage trying to pay back student loans, a decision we see many of her own countrymen face as their only viable means to survive.
If you are familiar with Beaton's comic strip work, you'll see familiar reference to the genesis of it here, but Ducks is a far more serious graphic novel. Both engaging and often times bleak, Ducks gives a wonderful window into the reality of Canada's oil industry, and the humanity of the people, who are nothing more than cogs in a machine, that run it.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2023
