While I normally like Kate Beaton's work, I personally found this story a little slow for my taste. Nothing against the book, but I just don't think it was for me.

I requested this since I love Kate Beaton's other works. This was very different and much more serious but also very important for everyone to think about. There is a good balance of humor mixed in but it really makes you think about how everyone deserves the right to resources.

Powerfully written, powerfully drawn. Kate Beaton's memoir is engrossing, painful, moving, and inspiring all at once. A look into a different life with so many familiar echoes. Highly recommended.

For a little-known industry to the average person, Ducks was a truly eye-opening autobiographical account of Kate Beaton's own experience leaving Cape Breton to the booming oil sands of Fort McMurray. We know it's heavily male-dominated and isolated, but with that comes the misogyny, the harassment, the mental harm that one faces being part of the minority. It's unlike Beaton's past graphic novels, and I'm grateful to her sharing this part of her life - the trauma, pain, sadness, but also the little joys she found. Unputdownable and unforgettable.

For those who know Kate Beaton from her historical web comic strip Hark! A Vagrant, Ducks feels like a departure. Instead of grappling with historical and literary figures, Beaton here grapples with her own history and time spent in the Albertan oil sands to pay off her student debts. Her familiar art and wit still carries into this work but the dejection of life in the oil fields is overwhelming. This is a must-read.

I know this book is winning a bunch of awards, but it wasn't for me. It's really long without doing enough to explain the background you need to understand the oil fields. It was also hard to remember the characters while reading in ebook format because I couldn't easily flip back to refresh my memory. Maybe would have been easier if I knew more about Canada.

This is a searing portrayal of the crushing economic realities people face, young graduates, like Kate in the story, as well as her older colleagues. Misogyny, poverty, and rights of Indigenous groups all rise to the surface in a memoir that captures the balance between doing what you love and what you need to survive.

While Kate Beaton is best known for her Hark! A Vagrant comics, this stunning graphic memoir shows her range. She chronicles her time working in the oil fields of Canada and the loneliness, isolation, and misogyny she encountered, as well as the exploitation of the land and the people working it. I highly recommend Ducks and look forward to whatever Beaton publishes next.

Kate Beaton should be one of the most important cartoonists in our generation. Her Hark! A Vagrant series is rich, witty, and thoughtful of its context and how people approach to literary classics as well as to historical events. IN that line, Ducks doesn't disappoint. This new novel is thought provoking and fresh, and a very interesting follow-up to her Hark period. Ducks is empathetic, thoughtful and very on point to our state of being.

I have loved all of Kate Beaton's humorous comics and read her picture books to children every chance that I get so I was worried about how I might feel about a not humorous graphic novel. I now view Kate as such a strong woman after reading about what she went through working in the oil sands. I also learned about oil sands for the first time. I hope that Beaton will continue to share her life through comics such as she did in Ducks.

First off, I’ve never heard of or thought about oil sands in Alberta, Canada. I thought this book would be about foreign oil, but that’s more of my world history teaching than anything. This book is very real. It would be considered a memoir. Which means it has its ups and downs. Overall, the story is very interesting. I learned things I didn’t know both about Canada, it’s providences, their school debt situation, etc. At the same time there were certain things you just knew were going to happen. Those certain things are trigger warning worthy the but the author has asked people not to give those trigger warning so I’ll just say some people could be triggered. Overall, this book was very slow: the art is great, it flows well, it is just the topic. It’s an interesting study that I am glad I have read. Am I likely to recommend it probably not because it wouldn’t be to the taste of most people that I know. However, I did learn something and I did think it was worth my time.

Kate Beaton, known for Hark! A Vagrant, takes readers in an entirely new direction with Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands and I honestly think its her best work yet. A memoir of her work at camps run by oil companies, Ducks is simultaneously hilarious, heart-wrenching, and infuriating. Beaton doesn't shy away from the struggle or the grit. Definitely one of my favorites this year.

A beautiful and poignant retelling of the author's experience in a remote industrial oil field operation. Beaton's story is a moving environmental, psychological, and cultural exploration of her experiences.

In 2005, a 22-year-old aspiring artist from a close-knit family in Cape Breton, eager to pay off her student loans, joined a wave of economic migration from the ‘have-not’ Atlantic provinces to northern Alberta. This fine graphic memoir is both a compelling personal story and an essential historical record. The reader quickly falls for Katie, a scruffy, quick-witted kid in a university sweatshirt whose first job, among many, involves working night shifts in the tool crib at the Syncrude base mine in Mildred Lake. Before long, the sexist culture of isolated, male-dominated work camps begins to undermine her plucky spirit. Where wealth flows, a newly politicized Katie observes, the attendant ills of addiction, depression and gendered violence go largely ignored. Her agile pen depicts a busy, belching, man-made hellscape punctuated by exquisite moments of kindness from fellow workers and of wonder in the contemplation of the night sky. -- GMG

Kate Beaton captures the struggle women face in a male dominated workplace with a fresh setting. Reminiscent of her fellow Canadian, Factory Summers by Guy Delisle, Beaton captures life working at the oil sands bringing a fascinating and engaging look at what most people would think would be mundane. A fantastic read and recommend read for all.

Ducks by Kate Beaton is an honest telling of a female’s experience working in the Alberta oil sands. Beaton’s illustrations depict her rural Nova Scotia upbringing and then her move to the desolate oil sands. This is a graphic novel I would recommend every women read and I plan on recommending it to many library patrons.

Absolutely powerful memoir. Kate Beaton takes the reader back to her two years on the oil fields in Canada. Showing the audience how hard and lonely to live that life is. Choosing a job that can pay your loans instead of a job that you love is nearly every persons reality as of late, Beaton shows just how heartbreaking that is.

Trigger warning: SA occurs and mentioned

Beaton’s authors note at the end explains how she would want reviews not to mention the sexual assault that happens within the book. I have to disagree with that request because not knowing that happens lead me to put the book down and not able to review until after the book was published. It is a trigger for me and trigger warnings should be mentioned for those still processing.

This book is as devastating as it is beautiful. I haven't devoured a graphic memoir in such a long time, but Kate Beaton's story was one I couldn't put down. I've never read anything quite like Ducks. The story is so singular and yet the heart of it is universal and so reflective of many people's experiences in one way or another.

While this is very different in scope and tone from her other works, Beaton's unique sense of humor and writing style are still very prominent in this book. Focusing on the two years she spent working in Canada's Oil Sands to pay off her student loans, Beaton paints a bleak, realistic look at how life was for her in these isolated and often depressing camps. It was fascinating, in a horrifying sort of way, reading about what it's like working in this environment, and the obstacles and trauma Beaton and her fellow workers (particularly the few women employed there) faced. The topics covered can by dark and heavy, but it is a worthwhile read and done well in a way only Beaton could pull off.

Perhaps Kate Beaton's best work yet, which is something, given her absolutely lustrous career. DUCKS is a coming-of-age narrative in an unusual setting: the oil sands of Alberta. A fascinating exploration of an industry and way of life that few, perhaps, have experienced. Her cartooning is immaculate here, rendering monstrous machinery and subtle facial expressions in equally vivid yet subtle detail. Beaton explores isolation, heartbreak, trauma, the exploitation of nature, growing up, poverty, and other heavy topics with a deft hand, putting her versatility and range on full display. This is one I will be thinking about for a long, long time.