Melanie Miller author page
1 puzzle by Melanie Miller
with Jeff Chen comments
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Impressive debut! Sunday 140-word puzzles are incredibly tough, maybe five times harder to make than a weekday 15x puzzle. I was worried to see a new constructor's name on a Sunday 140-worder, expecting a ton of gluey bits. Wow, was I pleasantly surprised!
I tore through the top few rows, all so nice and smooth. Sure, there's A NUT and STYE up in the starting corner, but I really don't mind STYE at all. And A NUT is a tiny price to pay to get a biggish corner with HOT PLATE and OPEN MIC. Great to complete the first couple of rows with just a minor STL (which Cardinals and Rams fans won't mind at all!).
Really nice to get a little snazz in the rest of the puzzle with SNOW CAP and CANDY EGG, and more importantly, I didn't hitch anywhere due to gluey bits. Well, the ETAPE / ETTE / HET UP region didn't feel great, but if that's the crunchiest part of a Sunday puzzle, that's not too shabby.
The theme — X THE Y phrases wackily clued as if they were parts of want ads — largely worked for me. Retail marketer to FILL THE GAP was funny, as was a cocktail waitress to CALL THE SHOTS, and a cruise ship band to ROCK THE BOAT. We even get an edgy answer, FLIP THE BIRD interpreted as a stunt pilot's job ("bird" = nickname for a helicopter).
A blackjack dealer needed to HIT THE DECK was the only one that fell flat for me. I'm curious to hear what kind of casinos Melanie is going to. (First rule of casino club, we don't talk about casino club?)
Odd choice of clue for ATOM. A perfectly good word with lots of science-related cluing potential, and we get A TO M, a half of a two-volume encyclopedia? I can see that the same old clues for ATOM get boring. But really …
A well-crafted puzzle. The (10!) themers are on the short side for a Sunday puzzle, and Melanie did well to take advantage of this, flipping two of them and pushing them to the puzzle's sides, thus making more space for the eight across themers.
Looking forward to more from Melanie!