Ducks

Beaton delivers a masterpiece graphic memoir

Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)

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, author of In the Dream House

A masterpiece, a heartbreak, a nightlight shining in the dark.

Patricia Lockwood, author of No One Is Talking About This

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, author of Fun Home

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, author of Uncanny Valley

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, author of 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, author of 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, author of O Beautiful