Holy shit, what a book! I've been reading Kate Beaton's work online since the livejournal days, starting in roughly 2009, just after the events which this memoir recounts. It's humbling to sit with the narrative of what was happening in the real life of an author I knew for her humorous history jokes in Hark! A Vagrant.

In 2005, Kate was a recent college graduate with a double degree in History and Anthropology, and a mountain of student debt. She came home to Cape Breton, in Eastern Canada, to a very bleak jobless landscape. So, she did what everyone was doing at the time: went to work in the oil sands in Alberta until she could pay her loans off. At twenty-two she had no idea what to expect or what she would find there; what the isolation, physically challenging work environment, and massive gender-imbalance of the employee population would lead to. Men outnumbered women sometimes fifty to one; sexual harassment during work hours and assault after hours in the camp dorms was rampant, as was depression and drug use. Slowly, over the course of three years, Kate became aware of the conversations around environmental impact and misuse of stolen Indigenous lands. This book, nearly 500 pages, does not tell; it shows, in excruciating detail, the human cost of this harsh, damaging industry. But while the money remains, people who feel they have no other choice will keep working the oil sands. No one who works there wants to be there, but the other industries they worked in before are gone.

I am extremely grateful that Beaton decided to write this book, and I hope the telling of the story was cathartic. Thank you also to Drawn and Quarterly, for giving me a copy in advance of its release. This is a heavy book, but I definitely recommend it, and I want to follow it up with some reading on how we begin addressing this huge, systemic problem.