Beaton is beloved for her hilarious short comics (Hark! A Vagrant! 2011) and sweetly maniacal picture books (The Princess and the Pony, 2015), so this graphic memoir, about working in the oil sands of Alberta, might seem out of left field. But the Beaton you know and love is undoubtedly here, from wry moments of comedy to her deceptively simple line work. Beaton opens with a cut-to-the-quick truth about her home in Nova Scotia: "there is no knowing Cape Breton without knowing how deeply ingrained two diametrically opposed experiences are: a deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently we have to leave it to find work somewhere else." Burdened with student-loan debt, Beaton decides to pay it off quickly by working in Alberta, where oil extraction is big business. There, she meets other Atlantic-coast Canadians in search of well-paying work, catches on quickly to her job distributing tools, and experiences both tender moments of real connection and thoughtless cruelty from her coworkers. Carefully detailed aerial views of dig sites are haunting visual pauses as Beaton discovers what she can--and can't--bear as she tries to make a life for herself. This lucid, vulnerable, and perfectly balanced graphic memoir weaves sharp moments of humor with a masterfully captured feeling of homesickness, illuminating the generational trauma of economic disinvestment as well as the cost--both human and environmental--of the fossil fuel industry. This is graphic memoir at its finest.

An ambitiously complex graphic narrative of a Nova Scotian woman's experience working in the oil sands of Fort McMurray, Alberta. Known primarily as the creator of the web-based comic series "Hark! A Vagrant," Beaton moves to memoir with this examination of the two years she spent working in the oil sands to pay off her student loans. The author begins with an introduction to her home in Cape Breton, where the people have "a deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently they will have to leave it to find work somewhere else. This push and pull defines us. It's all over our music, our literature, our art, and our understanding of our place in the world." On the surface, the book is a chronicle of the three years following the author's college graduation (she also spent a year working at the Maritime Museum of British Columbia), but Beaton captures much more than her personal story. She delves deep into the milieu of Fort McMurray, highlighting the complex relationships among the work camps, the oil companies, and the people living and working there. As the author recounts her time through several jobs, companies, and locations, she alternates the narration between the daily grind of the workers and the vistas of startling beauty surrounding them. She introduces each section by location and includes a list of the characters by job and home province, and she is careful to incorporate issues related to the local Indigenous peoples. After all, she writes, "the oil sands operate on stolen land." Beaton captures numerous poignant, sometimes heartbreaking moments throughout the book, but the cumulative effect of her many stories is even more impressive. She creates an indelible portrait of environmental degradation, fraught interpersonal relationships among a workforce largely disconnected from home, and greedy corporations that seem only vaguely aware of the difficult work's effect on their employees. A fascinating, harrowing, unforgettable book about a place few outsiders can comprehend. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant) delivers a masterpiece graphic memoir: an immersive, devastating portrait of the two years she worked at Fort McMurray and nearby oil sands in northern Canada. In 2005, Beaton, 21 and desperate to pay off her student loans, left her small Nova Scotia town for the booming wilds of an oil operation in Alberta. The human and environmental toll of energy dependence are painstakingly recorded on her Heart of Darkness--like journey: facing relentless sexism and misogyny (she estimates that men outnumber women 50 to 1 at the camps), Beaton moves through a series of gigs--doling out wrenches at "tool cribs," desk work in the supply office--and acutely feels the object of intense scrutiny; the crass remarks are endless, and at one point men line up around the building to get a look at the new girl. When hundreds of ducks become caught in a hazardous waste "tailings pond" around the time a coworker dies on site, Beaton begins to connect individual and global consequences. While she documents her own traumas, Beaton also steps back to observe how the isolation can transform ordinary people, remarking, for instance, that hearing catcalls delivered in the familiar accent of her Cape Breton home region is especially cutting. The homespun drawings and intuitive pacing capture both the dreariness and occasional splendor of this frozen world, with flashes of the author's trademark humor in the banter between her crusty coworkers. Beaton makes a shattering statement on the costs of ignorance and neglect endemic in the fuel industry, in both powerful discussions of its sociopolitical ramifications and her own keenly observed personal story. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Company. (Sept.)

A coming-of-age graphic memoir from Beaton (King Baby), best known for her decade-long webcomic Hark! A Vagrant. After graduating from college burdened with student debt in 2005, a then-21-year-old Beaton left her hometown of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to embark upon what eventually became a two-year stint working a mining job in Northern Canada's Athabasca oil sands, a huge petroleum deposit underneath and surrounded by vast boreal forest just below the arctic tundra. This graphic novel is an account of Beaton's experiences in the oil sands, where her first job is as a tool crib attendant, in charge of distributing hardware while enduring a constant barrage of crude remarks, catcalling, and obvious objectification from her male coworkers. As she moves between job sites and positions, she discovers that sexism and misogyny run rampant in the fuel industry (where men outnumber women 50-to-1) and that filing a harassment complaint will only get her admonished for expecting special treatment. As this detailed memoir progresses, Beaton encounters a succession of idiosyncratic employees who open her eyes to the physical and mental tolls of performing grueling labor in harsh condition. She also comes to understand the environmental havoc wreaked by fossil fuel dependence, but it's her depiction of how a victim of long-term abuse internalizes their trauma so thoroughly that they lose any sense of their own worth, that lingers beyond the last page. VERDICT An unflinchingly honest coming-of-age memoir and unforgettable depiction of capitalism's dehumanizing effect on the individual.