Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2022
New York Times Notable Book of 2022
New Yorker, Time, NPR, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post Best Book of 2022
Time Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2022
#1 on the Publishers Weekly 2022 Critics Poll
Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of 2022
Globe and Mail Top 100
"A vast and fascinating book, Ducks is a crucial turning point in the career of an important artist." — Etelka Lehoczky, NPR
"Ducks... is a rebuttal to hierarchies of silence, an attempt to draw attention to forms of suffering that are easier to ignore." — Sam Thielman, The New Yorker
"Kate Beaton's new masterpiece just rewrote the standard for graphic memoirs." — Rob Salkowitz, Forbes
“Complex and unforgettable.” — TIME Top 100 Books of the Year
"The stories in this illustrated memoir are as gritty and harrowing as you might expect, but there’s humor here, too, as well as compassion and tenderness." — New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022
"A fierce, thoughtful and revealing memoir about the Albertan oil industry, which puts money in the pockets of workers... and petrol in car tanks but leaves great scars on both the landscape of northern Canada and the people who staff its giant machines and equipment rigs." — Guardian Best Graphic Novels of 2022
"Ducks is a bruising and intimate account of survival and exploitation—of both the land and the people who worked on it—and is brought to life by Beaton’s immersive illustrations. In unveiling her plight, Beaton makes stunning observations about the intersections of class, gender, and capitalism." — TIME Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2022
"In a deeply beautiful way, Ducks offers a nuanced perspective on a place and industry that fuels much of Canada but that many of us know very little about. However, it also goes beyond that, presenting a deeply moving picture of humanity in general: lonely, disillusioned and, ultimately, redemptively compassionate." — Globe and Mail Top 100
"Ducks [is] a humane profile of struggling workers, the sorts who produce sneakers, smartphones and fossil fuels but remain faceless." — Chicago Tribune Best Books of 2022
“A monumental synthesis of history, politics, and herself… Ducks weaves Beaton’s own experiences withwarm, humane portraits of the many people she met on the oil sands… 55,000 square miles [that are] a controversial locus of the Canadian economy, culture, and politics, a byword for both prosperity and environmental destruction.” — Kathryn VanArendonk, Vulture
“What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book.” — Rachel Cooke, The Guardian
“Epic. Kate Beaton headed west [to] one of the world’s most environmentally destructive oil operations, where workers lived in barracks-like camps and men vastly outnumbered women. Her experience there… gave her an insider’s view into a place and piece of Canadian history few outsiders ever see.” — Robert Ito, New York Times
“A serious, moving, and heartfelt piece of cartooning that is as kind as it is fearless. Easily one of the most impressive graphic novels of this year, or works of any kind in the past decade.” — Graeme McMillan, Wired
“A masterpiece, a heartbreak, a nightlight shining in the dark.” — Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This
“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, Uncanny Valley
“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, Fun Home
"[A] soulful masterwork." — Washington Post
"[Ducks is] like the corpus of folk songs and tales from Cape Breton: a collection of small stories and anecdotes about working people, each made more meaningful by its proximity to others." — London Review of Books
