I thought I was going to read something like Paying the Land, & instead I got a memoir of two harrowing years working in the hostile environment (& hostile work environment) of the Tar Sands of Alberta. With what she saw & went through, I can see why it took Beaton over 10 years to put this memoir out. Even though Ducks focuses on Beaton's own experiences in the tar sands mines, there are so many different things going on in this book. This is a very Canadian book, with provincial identity playing a big part (especially the Atlantic Provinces). I really want to learn more about Atlantic Canada accents now. So many pages of Ducks contain a strange mix of offering some new bit of trivia & then a memory of some degradation or trauma the author had to go through. The part where Lindsay is looking at comments on a news site is literally difficult to look at. I'm so trained to ignore comments & Beaton did such a good job of rendering that comments section look, that it took extra concentration for me to see & read the ones on the page in this book. It's insane that the tar sands, the place of all this misery, trauma, & destruction, were in full gold rush mode at the very time the world should have been aggressively moving away from fossil fuels (& knew it). I wish we could have seen more about the “cleaning ladies”. I wondered what was going on with them. I also wonder about the first nations people who live in the Tar Sands areas. Why were they completely unrepresented among the workers Beaton encountered? I guess that just illustrates that Canada is as much a settler colonial project as the United States.