Sharon Delorme author page

As a practical joker, I dug this theme. Appropriate for April Fool's Day! Each of the props is a common enough gag, and all of them work well as snappy crossword entries. JOY BUZZER is such a lively entry, plus it has all those juicy Scrabbly letters in it. Fun stuff. I'd make a "pull my finger" joke, but that isn't exactly NYT-suitable. (Sadly.)

Speaking of those Scrabbly letters, Sharon does a nice job of grid layout to facilitate smooth filling around the J and the pair of Zs. The blocks right below the J and the Z help her section things off, and there are a lot of three-letter options ending with either J or Z (TAJ, HAJ, RAJ, etc. / ADZ, TAZ, BOZ, etc.). Really only the MAZDA slot provides any sort of difficulty, and Sharon does well to fill that corner smoothly.

Usually, themers are alternated (left-right-left-right) to reduce the amount of overlap between adjacent pairs, but Sharon aligns both JOYBUZZER and DRIBBLE GLASS to the right. That's less of an issue if there are two (or more) rows between themers, but with just one row here, there are bound to be some challenges. Once you get the nice COBWEB in place along with TAJ, it's pretty hard to avoid something like ABOO.

Another challenge in the west and east sections, curiously. There's no hate in LOVE/HATE for me, just a beautiful entry. And I appreciated getting RIVIERA crossing it! That does constrain the east section though, resulting in NEBR. Similar sort of thing going on in the west, with OEN and ON UP as the price to pay. Overall, I think the trade-offs are reasonable, though. I liked GAG ORDER and IMELDA enough that those little OEN / ON UP bits didn't bother me much.

Finally, beautiful clue for ABBOT. Who but the head of an abbey would be a keeper of brothers? Great repurposing of a common "my brother's keeper" saying.