50 pages • 1 hour read
Magic Hour: A Novel
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Character Analysis
Julia Cates
Dr. Julia Cates is the novel’s protagonist. She is a dynamic and round character. A kind-hearted, sensitive person, Julia is a child psychiatrist who specializes in helping children who have been through trauma. Despite Julia’s skill in helping children, she feels guilty because her client, Amber, killed a group of teenagers before dying by suicide. Although the judge absolves her, Julia still feels responsible. However, Julia begins to heal from her guilt when she meets Alice and channels her pain toward helping a child in need.
Julia’s main internal conflict stems from her desire to protect Alice. Her patience allows Alice to come out of her shell because she does not put any external pressure on her. Julia’s main goal is guiding Alice toward recovery, and this is freeing for Alice because she does not attach stipulations for how her recovery should look. Julia’s tenderness toward Alice and other traumatized children stems from her own childhood with a cruel father. Even though Julia runs away from Rain Valley because of her bad memories, her return to her hometown allows her to reconnect with her sister and heal their relationship. Although Julia tends to self-isolate, she learns that she needs community to fully heal. Through her relationship with Max, she learns how to be vulnerable, which gives her a greater ability to love and heal from her past.
Since Alice’s recovery mirrors Julia’s healing, Julia grows as a person through her connection to Alice. As Alice learns to trust Julia, Julia regains her confidence in herself as a psychiatrist. Alice’s recovery shows Julia that she is not responsible for what happened to Amber and that her life does not have to end because of her guilt. As Julia erases her guilt, she releases her preconceived notions about her career and settles down with Max and Alice in Rain Valley.
Ellie Barton
Ellie Barton is Julia’s sister and the chief of police in Rain Valley. Ellie is beautiful, but she thinks that everyone around her is always jealous of her and behaves selfishly as a result. Since Ellie has difficulty taking criticism, she hurts the people around her and does not take responsibility for how her actions affect others. Ellie was popular in school and overshadowed her sister, earning her father’s approval while Julia never could. She has trouble understanding why Julia does not have the same happy memories from their childhood that she does. Even after Ellie’s two marriages end in divorce, she does not take the time to assess how her actions affect others; rather she assumes that she will find love and the home life she wants by behaving the same as always.
Ellie’s main internal conflict stems from her selfishness and her focus on her career. When Alice arrives in Rain Valley, Ellie refuses to give the case to anyone else because she wants to prove that she can handle it. Ellie does not know how Julia’s trauma with Amber has affected her, so she does not understand why Julia fears the media. However, as her relationship with Cal grows, Ellie sees her selfish behavior and makes efforts to change because she does not want to end up isolated. She repairs her relationship with Julia by learning how to empathize with her experience. This empathy allows Ellie to open herself up to the possibility of a relationship with Cal.
George’s arrival in Rain Valley threatens to ruin Ellie’s character development because she finds herself attracted to his good looks, even though she knows what she has with Cal is special. However, Ellie shows her change of character by not pursuing a fling with George and instead focusing on a real relationship with Cal. Cal’s love for Ellie shows that her life may look the way she envisioned, but that is not a bad thing. Her relationship with Cal gives her the love she always wanted and the family life she always dreamed of having. By working on herself, Ellie learns the importance of family and community over status or her career.
Alice
Alice, originally named Brittany, is a six-year-old girl whom Julia helps recover from trauma. Terrance Spec abducted Alice when she was almost two years old. In her captivity, Alice was bound to a stake and eventually abandoned by Terrance to starve to death. However, Alice escaped and made her way to Rain Valley. When the narrative takes Alice’s perspective, Alice uses simple wording, which then manifests in her speech patterns once she speaks aloud. Although Alice expresses animalistic behaviors at first and is nonverbal, Julia’s work with her helps her heal and eventually relearn how to speak.
Alice’s main internal conflict stems from mistrusting other people, especially since fear rules her life. Even though she resorts to violence several times in the narrative, Julia is the only person who realizes that this comes from a place of fear and a desire to survive. Her behaviors exhibit extreme fear because “fear had been the norm forever” (76). Once Alice learns to trust Julia, she experiences the world for the first time through the lens of safety and love.
When Alice shows the police where she lived in captivity, she symbolically moves on from her past by not going to the site and freeing her wolf pup instead. In this action, Alice shows that she understands that the wolf belongs in the wild while Alice belongs with Julia and her newfound community. However, Alice’s fear of abandonment is so strong that when George takes her away from Julia, she regresses. She misunderstands what is happening and tells George that Julia does not want her because she is a bad girl.
Because Alice can vocalize her fears, she is reunited with Julia. When Alice calls Julia “Jewlee Mommy,” she shows how far her recovery has come and that she wants to be her daughter—she has experienced some closure about what happened to her “old Mommy” and is ready to experience love again. In the Epilogue, Alice no longer allows fear to rule her; she attends school for the first time and moves forward with her life.
Max Cerasin
Dr. Max Cerasin is Rain Valley’s main medical doctor. He is an attractive man who is grieving his son’s death and self-medicates with adrenaline rushes. Max moves to Rain Valley from LA because he wants to escape the memories of his old life, and he keeps his trauma buried deep inside. He was previously married and had a son named Danny, who died when a drunk driver hit their car. Although Max does not reveal the root of his trauma to Julia until the end of the novel, Julia knows that he tries to numb his pain through rock climbing or brief sexual encounters with women. Julia offers him the possibility of a new life if he chooses to be vulnerable enough to love again.
When Max examines Alice after Ellie brings her to the hospital, his insistence on calling a specialist for Alice pushes the narrative forward. Once Max meets Julia, he believes that he can charm her like he does everyone else in the town. However, Julia’s perceptiveness exposes Max’s vulnerabilities, and he realizes that he cannot hide from her like he does from everyone else.
Despite Max’s attraction to Julia, he wrestles with pursuing a relationship with her because he understands how painful it is to lose a loved one. However, Julia’s vulnerability in loving Alice despite her trauma over Amber encourages Max to trust her. Even though Max has run away from his grief, he finally faces it when he watches Alice for a few hours. He feels so overwhelmed by the familiarity of a child asking him to read that he breaks down in tears. Alice comforts him, and he reads to her, realizing that the love can exist outside of his love for Danny if he wants it to. Once Max tells Julia that he wants to pursue a relationship with her, their love grows, especially as they care for Alice together. Max and Julia’s trust in each other exemplifies the reality of healing from past trauma and the possibility of hope for a new future.
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