| Phoenix/Hawk | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
| Title | ||
| Fifi | ||
| Ninja Nix | ||
| Vital Statistics | ||
| Gender | Female | |
| Family | ||
| Status | Alive | |
| Eye Color | ||
| Hair Color | ||
| Height | Unknown | |
| Other | ||
| Affiliation | ||
| Weapons | ||
| Species | ||
| Home | ||
| Appearances | ||
Hawk a.k.a. Phoenix is the daughter of Maximum Ride and Fang. She was born towards the end of Maximum Ride Forever.
History[]
Maximum Ride Forever[]
Months after the Apocalypse, Max and Fang spend the night together just before the Flock separates to go its different ways. A few months later, during the final confrontation with the Remedy, Max reveals her pregnancy.
Max gives birth to a daughter she names Phoenix in the underground bunker of Himmel during a nuclear winter. Phoenix spends the first four years of her life underground with the Flock, until it is safe for them to reemerge and fly south.
The Flock travels with Phoenix to the Peruvian rainforest. The whole Flock helps raise and teach her, though Max and Fang spend the most time with her. The book ends as they prepare to take Phoenix, now almost five years old, for her first real flight.
Hawk[]
At age five, Phoenix is separated from her parents. At some point in the following years, she begins going by the name Hawk and moves into the McCallum Children’s House, where she grows up along other mutant and outcast kids. Her only companion is her pet hawk Ridley.
Hawk is waiting at her street corner when two thugs, Racelli and Tony, attack her. She fights them off easily with the help of her hawk Ridley. She waits until the time is 5:30 and leaves to collect food for her friends.
On the way she runs into Pietro who is forced to duel a Chung. To Hawk's disgust, Pietro ends up killing the Chung and she leaves. She returns to her friends and shares the food.
At the age of fifteen, Hawk is reunited with her father and the rest of the Flock, and sets out with them to save her mother and her friends and free the City of the Dead.
Appearance[]
As a young child, Phoenix has Max's light brown eyes and her father's blue-black wings and hair.
In HAWK, many years later, her eyes are now black. Her wings are dark brown with tan undersides like her mom, and the top of her wings are black like Fang's.
At age fifteen, Hawk wears her black hair cut in a mohawk with a long tail. She has feathers tattooed over her eyebrows, and piercings in her nose, ears and eyebrow. She is taller than Max.
Personality[]
In Maximum Ride Forever, Phoenix is shown to be defiant and obstinate at times, as well as curious and active. Max compares it to her own and calls it "karma." Max states that she has Fang's quiet tendencies and his smirk.
After growing up alone, Hawk is independent and determined with a sarcastic streak. Having grown up on the streets, she is wary, distrustful and jaded. She inherits that from her mother Max. She is an inexperienced flyer and is naïve about many things outside the City of the Dead, for instance not knowing what the ocean is.
Abilities[]
- Flight
- enhanced strength
- enhanced healing
- underwater breath
Relationships[]
Hawk is protective of fellow mutant kids Clete, Moke, Rain and Calypso, and also has a pet hawk named Ridley. As a teen, she begins to fall in love with her old friend Pietro Pater.
She is a lot like her mother Max, to the point where their personalities clash.
Originally, as Hawk does not remember her life before she became a street kid, when told who her parents were she did not believe them. She resented her parents because she believed they had abandoned her to strive for herself, and continue to disagree with them.
She is more bitter towards her mother than to her father, even refusing Max's advice for her flying until Max saves her.
In the epilogue, her relationships with the Flock and her parents are closer and warmer, showing a maternal relationship between her and Max.
Trivia[]
- How old was Max when she had her daughter? Near the beginning of Maximum Ride Forever, an enemy identifies the Flock as "ranging in ages from seven to fifteen." Max celebrated her fifteenth birthday the previous year, in FANG. She is probably approaching her sixteenth birthday when Phoenix is conceived, and is at least sixteen by the time she gives birth.
- The character of Phoenix is similar to Frances Jane and Ozymandias Jr., Max's twins born during the events of The Lake House. This was one of James Patterson's earlier books for adult readers which inspired the Maximum Ride series.
- In ancient mythology, the phoenix is a fiery bird that turns into ash when it dies; a new phoenix then rises from the ashes. Max says that the name indicates that Phoenix, born in the ruins of the apocalypse, helped them all "rise from the ashes," but Phoenix will be allowed to pick her own name one day. The name could also reference that she has Fang's invincibility gene. Phoenix does eventually pick her own name, Hawk.
- Total and Nudge call her "Fifi", and the boys call her "Ninja Nix".
- Hawk is portrayed on the U.S. cover of HAWK with brown hair and no visible piercings.
- Hawk’s eye and feather color change between Maximum Ride Forever and HAWK. It is unclear whether this is a result of aging. Max, Iggy, and Brigid Dwyer are other characters whose appearances have been inconsistent over the series.
- Some early promotional blurbs for HAWK said that she was seventeen and had been on her own for thirteen years, rather than a fifteen-year-old who had been on her own for ten years.