Before she became a best-selling cartoonist, Kate Beaton was a young university graduate with a massive student loan debt and no significant job prospects in Cape Breton. So like many Atlantic Canadians at the time she picked up for Alberta's oil sands and its promise of jobs that paid good money. Ducks is a weighty, tense and nuanced memoir of her two years working different oil patch sites, where she was one of the very few women.

Beaton shares both the unvarnished awful around her - the gender-based violence, the workers' personal and mental health struggles, the workplace accidents - and the moments of kindness and support that kept her going. Her haunting black and white drawings of the various worksites in between her chapters evoke not just environmental impacts but also the isolation of the workers. Ducks is a memoir and it wasn't until late in her stint there that Beaton started to learn about the environmental devastation of the oil sands, as well as impacts on local First Nations. These dynamics are there as haunting background as the narrative continues, with the lives of the workers in the foreground.

I read the entire book on a plane, fully absorbed. Content warning for

Spoiler

sexual assault

but I felt she handled the topic thoughtfully and profoundly.