A Goodreads user asked Michelle Hodkin:

Do you have any regrets about how you treated your characters? Any decisions you made for your them that you would change now?

Michelle Hodkin Good question! I don't think I do have any regrets about how I treated them. Mara gets the brunt of it, of course, and I knew when I originally conceived of the idea of her that she would _have_ to go through awful, horrific things in order to feel compelled to do the things she does in Retribution, which make her the person she is. I think (well-written) characters become antiheroes or villains because they've endured such misery...it's so much less interesting to me when a character is just born sadistic/evil/psychopathic/whatever. I'm fascinated by what made them that way, so in creating Mara, I knew that's what I'd have to think about--what would a teenage girl have to endure to become the person Mara is by the end of Retribution.

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