Every guy there – even the older, married ones, even the men with families back home – make comments to her, about her, they literally line up to get a glimpse of what she looks like. Kate is young, just out of college, and while she’s aware of the possibility of sexual assault, she’s really not expecting the environment she’s thrust into to be so stressful. This is a heavy graphic memoir about an isolated place that seems to change everyone who comes in contact with it. The oil sands are a complicated place, not all good, not all bad, but Kate is relieved when her loans are paid off and it’s time to go.

As her time there drags on, the environmental effects of the oil sands begin to weigh on her, along with the cultural effects that these operations have had on the indigenous populations of the area. Sexual harassment is a daily experience rape and sexual assault abound, and unfortunately, Kate isn’t immune to this. There are hardly any women up there, and so the attention Kate gets from every single man around her is both overwhelming and unwanted. Figuring she’ll stay there just long enough to pay off her loans, Kate knows the environment will be tough, but she’s shocked by the hyper-masculinzed hellscape that it turns out to be. In order to pay off her student loans, Kate takes a job in the oil sands of Alberta, working for a major oil company in the tool crib. Kate Beaton is from Cape Breton, and everyone knows that in order to make anything of yourself economically, you can’t stay there.

Trigger warnings for sexual assault there’s nothing graphic, but there are multiple rapes discussed in this book.

No matter, though! It came home with me and I read it in less than a day. I thought I’d put it on my TBR (I remember nowhere near me had it, though, so I would’ve had to get it via interlibrary loan), but weirdly, I didn’t end up having it on my list after I recognized it at a shelf on my first visit to our new library. The premise – about a young woman’s time working for the oil companies in Alberta, far from her home in Cape Breton – sounded fascinating. A while back, I learned about the existence of the graphic memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (Drawn and Quarterly, 2022).

Ducks book beaton