MixedLos Angeles Review of Books Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains , the debut collection of essays from Maine native Kerri Arsenault, serves as a salutary reminder that there are still places in New England that are organized around churning factories ... Mill Town is a hard book to classify. It’s partly a memoir, in which Arsenault investigates her family history, and partly an exposé, in which Arsenault investigates the horrific pollution generated by the paper mill and the litany of death that led a TV news crew to call the area \'Cancer Valley.\' The interweaving of these narratives is an ambitious project, one that Arsenault doesn’t quite pull off. Even so, Mill Town is a valuable addition to the literature of New England’s industrial legacy, something many residents have either forgotten or choose to ignore, to the region’s detriment ... Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains suffers from Kerri Arsenault’s inexperience as a journalist, so her investigations can come off as less than dogged, regardless of how many years she spent on them. And at times, I wished Arsenault had investigated herself a bit more deeply. I wondered how she felt leaving Maine for a college in the Midwest, for example.
