Tess Davison author page
1 puzzle by Tess Davison
with Jeff Chen comments
See the answer words debuted by Tess Davison.
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I suppose I'll have to settle for my daughter being the second Tess published in the NYT crossword. Get your butt in gear, said the tiger dad to his five-year-old!
I kid. Sort of.
Despite my spite, I admired so much about this double-debut puzzle. Tess and Kathy managed to distinguish their effort from other hidden GEM, birthstone, rock-themed etc. crosswords I've seen. Three notable points:
- There are so many different birthstone listings out there, many of which include exotic gems like peridot, alexandrite, tanzanite. Although these are fun-sounding words, they'd elude a large swath of newer solvers. Sticking to basic stones that most everyone will know is perfect.
- Check out Wikipedia's list of birthstones. Note how Tess and Kathy focused on the most relevant sub-list, the 2019 US one. They could have easily branched out to draw from everything — CARNELIANS or CATS EYES might have been useful — but focused, making the theme tight.
- Most of the time, they concentrated their hidden letters, taking pairs at a time whenever they could. TH and ST within AMETHYSTS is fantastic, because it lends an elegance that wouldn't have been present if T H S T had been strewn about one by one.
It's far from a dense theme — 40 theme squares is much lower than average — so I'd expect a squeaky-clean grid packed chock-full of color. Solid performance on the latter criterion, with so much SCHNAPPS WASHED UP ARUGULA CABANAS MYSTERY SCANDAL SEA SLUG material. It's rare to get so much mid-length snazzy fill on a Monday, and it was a solving pleasure.
The cleanliness factor needed improvement. Monday puzzles ought to be uber-welcoming to solvers of all levels, and crossings like ELMIRA / ELIA and RES / RANI can scare people off. Along with an inelegant collection of AGT ASA EEG ERG and VAR at the important 1-D spot, it needed another round of revision. Having a central 9-letter entry does create a lot of filling difficulty, but with so few theme constraints, both color and clarity are achievable.
Overall, a debut that I enjoyed more and more as I studied and thought about the themer choices. It would have been great to get an additional layer of clever wordplay, maybe playing on STRATA (rock layers!) + GEM = STRATAGEM, but that could have pushed it into mid-week territory.