This was terrific. We get Locke, Jean, and Sabetha, their backstory (Scott pulls off the old past-present alternating chapters well), and a contest with unfair rules and unfairer outcome. I loved how, again, Scott makes clear that the women in the story (mostly Sabetha, but not only) have agency, and character. No matter if they choose to fuck people or not, their choices are shown to be theirs and valid, and men who don't respect that are shown to be assholes. It's great.
The Scar is the second volume of Chine Miéville's Bas-Lag series, and it's as impressive as the first one. Only very loosely connected, we now explore the wider Bas-Lag world instead of New Crobuzon. Again, China Miéville excells with implicit worldbuilding, forcing the reader to think along and ahead (though there's less culture shock included than in Perdido Street Station).
I enjoyed that I was most of the time not cheering for the protagonist and her view of the world, and did not like her particularly, without hating her either. All characters were very morally ambiguous, nearly none just likeable. Same for the story – there was never a clear-cut villain, or a predictable course (for example: not all of the likeable characters got simply killed off). As I spend most of my reviews arguing for exactly this – morally ambiguous characters, implicit and clever worldbuilding, no Good v Evil – I was very pleased with this book. At no time it felt like something groundbreaking, but it definitely is a very good book, and I'm looking forward to the final work in the trilogy.
Crispin's Model is modern Lovecraftian horror – well done, but I'm not into Lovecraftian horror all that much, and not into painting either, so it didn't grip me.
Uprooted by Naomi Novik was a perfect fantasy story/fairytale. It's got all the right parts (dark magic, regular magic, unimpressed heroine, ambivalent wizard, etc), but isn't terribly predictable, and forms real characters instead of shadows of well-known archetypes. By following the easy-to-like first-person narrator Agnieszka, and seeing her relate to the Dragon, her best friend Kasia, and all the others, painted a vivid and realistic picture of the world. We even get a surprising amount of moral ambivalence, considering the genre. A very good book. I may start to read Naomi Novik's fantasy series if Uprooted is any indicator for that series' quality.