Character Profile: Jade

I recently found the draft version of the Magic on Main Street Character profiles. I was originally going to make them longer and write more of them but I decided to just go ahead and publish them as is rather then never share them. Important: character profile posts do contain spoilers! If you haven’t read the Magic on Main Street series yet I suggest you wait to read these character profiles until you finish!

Jade O'Niel

Jade is reminiscent of Pip from Pack of Dawn and Destiny in that she is already very competent and skilled by the time we meet her, unlike Hazel, Leila, and Chloe who all undergo training to get new skills.

If we want to get really detailed, Jade is the only female main character in Magiford who gains no new powers during her books, as Pip gets a form of new magic, too.

But while Jade might be the complete package when it comes to kicking butt, knowing her limits, and understanding how to fight in a group, there is still a trait she spends the entire series working hard to master, and that is her social anxiety. (And her baking skills, but mostly her social anxiety.)

Jade, having grown up in a home where family was everything, might possess enough skills to make her a human swiss army knife, but she never socialized much outside her paternal and maternal family. When she did it was either 1) on a job—which she had trained for or 2) with another slayer family or for training purposes, like the werewolves she trained with.

Much the way you can see characters like Hazel and Leila improve at magic throughout the course of their series, you can see Jade’s path to improvement as well.

It was very important to me to show that Jade didn’t stop doubting—even in the last book she still has a hard time grasping why her team is so awed of her—but she learns that just because she has her doubts, doesn’t mean those doubts are real.

Jade is a unique character in that she has a lot of heart immediately from the very start of the book, and she is a very rare person in that she’s able to forgive Considine for his little Connor/Ruin act, and move on much faster than any of my other Magiford Heroines would have been able to. (Hello, Hazel…)

Jade doesn’t have to learn how to love others more, she doesn’t even have to adjust the way she views others, instead she has to learn how to be more accepting/easier of herself, and to work constructively on her issues instead of letting them dangerously fester.

So that’s Jade O’Niel in a nutshell! What did you think of her as a heroine? I’ll admit, I still included training scenes for her because it always bothers me in books/movies how heroines can stay effortlessly fit when it takes serious work to develop and keep those kinds of physical abilities!