** spoiler alert ** OH, how I wish I could give this 5 stars.

The reason I can't?

I've read Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series.

The character development is spectacular, and the emotions each character feels and the tension between them seems to just leap off the page. But felt like the whole novel was just Monette's series... slightly sqashed and then straightened out.

Margrave Royston (aka Felix Harrowgate) is a gay, exiled magician. Felix was the more vibrant, memorable character - so Monette: 1, Jones/Bennett:0. Rook (a mashup of both Felix and Mildmay Foxe in that he talks like a guttersnipe and is as predictable and violent as a tsunami) is, eerily enough, brother to Thom (again, a mashup of Felix and Mildmay in that he is ever so calm and stable, and has crawled his way from the gutter to rubbing elbows with intellectuals), in a sweet twist that I really enjoyed. Though I will admit that I love Rook slightly more than sanity should allow, I ADORED Mildmay and the juxtaposition of his and Felix's personalities better than Rook's and Thom's. But I guess Monette and Jones/Bennett are tied on that one.

I liked Hal and the tension between him and the Royston in the beginning, but by the end he just seemed like a useless, weepy sod and I didn't really understand how Royston put up with him (he reminded me of Monette's Gideon, although hers was much more believable/selfish/human). So Monette wins on that score again.

Even the settings of the books were so similar that it was easy to imagine that it was just a different set of characters in Monette's Melusine. One thing I would commend these authors on is that they kept it simple and still managed to produce great characters - Monette's writing is a quite a bit more complicated, which is not always necessary. The plot of Havemercy was lacking too, but the characters were so lovely that I could overlook it.

I will *definitely* check out the rest of this series because I lovelovelove the way these women write, I just wish they would... go for more originality? More of a plotline? The metal dragons made an appearance for what felt like a total of 5 pages in the whole book (but they were fairly boring, so that was no great loss for me), which made the title of the novel a little strange... However, I could honestly have read an entire novel about Thom and Rook and the other airmen, so that itself made this an amazing read.