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. 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. 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. But the Beaton you know and love is undoubtedly here, from wry moments of comedy to her deceptively simple line work. 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.
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