About
Peternelle van Arsdale is an independent book editor and the author of two young adult novels, The Beast Is an Animal (2017) and The Cold Is in Her Bones (2019). Peternelle's essays have been published by LitHub, Hypable.com, and Culturefly, and her short fiction has been published by The Whitefish Review. She has also performed personal essays for the storytelling series Generation Women. Raised in Newark, New Jersey, she is a long-time New Yorker who now lives in New Paltz, New York, where she is at work on her third novel.
Featured Work
The Cold Is in Her Bones
Milla knows two things to be true: Demons are real, and fear will keep her safe.
Milla’s whole world is her family’s farm. She is never allowed to travel to the village and her only friend is her beloved older brother, Niklas. When a bright-eyed girl named Iris comes to stay, Milla hopes her loneliness might finally be coming to an end. But Iris has a secret she’s forbidden to share: The village is cursed by a demon who possesses girls at random, and the townspeople live in terror of who it will come for next.
Now, it seems, the demon has come for Iris. When Iris is captured and imprisoned with other possessed girls, Milla leaves home to rescue her and break the curse forever. Her only company on the journey is a terrible new secret of her own: Milla is changing, too, and may soon be a demon herself.
Suspenseful and vividly imagined, The Cold Is in Her Bones is a novel about the dark, reverberating power of pain, the yearning to be seen and understood, and the fragile optimism of love.
Other Works
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The Beast Is an Animal
2017