Stephen King in his book On Writing observes: People love reading about other people’s jobs. It makes me immediately curious—what would it be like to work in an oil camp, to live with your colleagues, to be the one of the only women in a sea of men?

Spoiler: it’s about how you would expect.

But Ducks goes farther than that, and Beaton picks at the truly heartbreaking realization that camp psychology is strong enough to change anyone for the worse. The final scene synthesizes the entire experience so perfectly: Kate is out with friends a while after she had stopped working at the camps. A guy on the street recognizes one of them from the camps, and the girl immediately reverts to camp psychology survival mode: try to be pleasant and survive the conversation without it ending in overt aggression, even though the entire interaction is dehumanizing and humiliating. When the guy wraps up and leaves, the non-camp friends are horrified. The contrast between camp psychology against the backdrop of the real world proves the point: the camps change people into aggressors and victims in a way that wouldn’t be tolerated outside of that microcosm.

Overall, the storytelling and pacing is good. The art is definitely secondary, but that’s okay. The book reaches the level where it becomes more than the sum of its parts… I guess that is a great definition of art.