#iamgoinggraphic

Kate Beaton Drawn and Quarterly @drawnandquarterly

(Published September 13th 2022)

After university, Kate Beaton headed west, like many others, searching for a job opportunity. She heard about Alberta’s oil rush, and hoped to find something that will help her to pay off her student loans. Arriving in Fort McMurray, Beaton finds work in the lucrative camps owned and operated by the world’s largest oil companies. For two years, she worked in a place dominated by men.

Beaton’s graphic memoir is powerful, and so interesting. She depicts everything from the harsh reality of life in the oil sands where trauma is an everyday occurrence yet never discussed. For months, she lived in a small community where colossal machineries and machines were the only scenery. Her testimony as a woman worker in the Oil Sands is strong, deep and touching.

Antonio Iturbe Salva Rubio Lilit Zekulin Thwaites Loreto Aroca Macmillan Children's Publishing Group, Godwin Books @macmillanusa

Based on the experience of real-life Auschwitz prisoner Dita Kraus, this graphic novel tells the incredible story of a courageous girl who risked her life to keep the magic of books alive during the Holocaust.

Fourteen-year-old Dita is one of the many imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz. The teenager is a book lover and devoured every book she could put her hands on before the war. But she was taken, along with her mother and father, from the Terezín ghetto in Prague, and is adjusting to the constant terror that is life in the camp. Her life brightens when Jewish leader Freddy Hirsch asks Dita to take charge of eight precious volumes the prisoners have managed to sneak past the guards.