Portia Lundie author page
1 puzzle by Portia Lundie
with Jeff Chen comments
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What a fun touch to put MEDUSA in a hair-themed puzzle! Although, I wouldn't want to be the one to tell her, come on, LET YOUR HAIR DOWN already. Come to think of it, the same goes for Lara Croft. I'm sure that both would leave the messenger more than a little DISCOMBOBULATED.
Wait. MEDUSA does leave people in a state of PERMAFROST. Huh ...
Kidding aside, I enjoyed the HAIR DOWN party. Something visually interesting about getting tresses falling within Down theme answers. BRAID within TOMB RAIDER is a great find.
I wondered about BOB. Will is usually strict about "hidden words" having to be broken across two words, like BILBO BAGGINS or TURBO BOOST. A short trigram found encapsulated within a long word isn't that interesting (although some editors are much more lax about this).
A treat to get ROC-A-FELLA (such a great pun!) and the tarot's high PRIESTESS, along with DR RUTH and some EMO POP, ASTORIA. Solid bonuses.
Some may wonder, was the trade-off of having ROCAFELLA/PRIESTESS worth the price of OPPS, PCB, LPS, RET? Why not split up those long bonuses and fill the grid more cleanly?
A-ha! Because Portia was already at the 78-word maximum. It's tough to avoid this sort of compromise when you're working with a vertically-oriented theme because the alternative often is to work with long Across bonuses instead (for example, removing the block between CMINOR and TIN). However, including long Across bonuses tends to muddy up what is theme and what is not.
I do think that with four themers, the grid could have had as many bonuses while being cleaner, but that's asking for more or less a total redo, spending fewer black squares in the center of the grid.
All in all, an entertaining debut, albeit with some elements that produced a few tangles.