Over The Hills Of Green

LOCAL AUTHOR

Anna Reilly, a cognitive psychologist at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, is assigned an amnesia case. A mysterious mental health patient, John Doe, seems at first like the perfect subject for her thesis. Anna feels she has finally caught a break and her life is on the right path. After a traumatic and unexplained event took place during her teenage years, Anna built a scientific and pragmatic worldview to chase away the monsters she once saw in her youth. She is also engaged to a pediatric psychiatrist named Ted; marriage seemed the next logical step in their relationship. Yet, Anna can’t remember what happened to her when she was fourteen. And she can’t help but feel alone, even with a fiancé.

As Anna spends time with John Doe, she finds herself drawn to the charismatic stranger and driven to solve the mystery of his identity. John has a time-traveling story. He claims to have traversed time and space for true love. He weaves a mythical story of his life on Earth and in the Otherworld. Anna attempts to treat him as a patient and the subject of her thesis. But as a blizzard approaches New York City, she and John are bound together in her apartment until the storm passes. There is something so familiar about him, something she can’t remember from her haunted past, and Anna finds herself pushing professional boundaries, lines she promised she would never cross. Plus, the monsters from her childhood have returned.

Over The Hills of Green is the second book in The Green Hills series. The first book, Print In The Snow, won the Independent Publisher Book Awards and set in motion the events that change young Anna’s life forever. E.V. Svetova’s spellbinding prose takes readers from the harsh walls of a mental institution, and a snow-covered New York City, into a magical realm filled with monsters and elves. John Doe and Anna Reilly’s will-they/won’t-they status is a page-turner, and their relationship evolves into something unimaginable as John attempts to melt away the walls Anna has built since childhood. Anna is also a strong protagonist in her own right. With John Doe’s case, she risks losing touch with her career, her fiancé—and possibly her mind. Her search for John after he disappears inevitably becomes a search for self. Svetova does not disappoint, providing answers to who the mysterious John Doe is as well as the answers to the mysteries of the universe.