Welcome to Sunday Puzzle Warm-Up, a weekly opportunity to have a little fun and to get your brain in gear for the regular Sunday Puzzle (which posts Sunday evenings at 8 pm Eastern time).
Last week's warm-up puzzle spotlighted the book Sally Heathcote, Suffragette, written by Mary Talbot and illustrated by Kate Charlesworth. It was published in the UK last month and is scheduled to be published in the US in September. Mary Talbot won a best biography award last year for Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, a biography of Lucia Joyce (daughter of James Joyce), and her new book looks to be headed for critical acclaim as well. You'll find a fuller description of the book in tonight's diary.
As for tonight's puzzle, once again I let the gremlins provide the puzzle since I'm still running late on everything. I asked them to explain the meaning of tonight's verticals to me, or at least to explain the meaning of tonight's diary title, but they just laughed their gremlin laughs and wouldn't say a word. So in addition to tonight's JulieCrostic there's also the riddle in the title to figure out.
You'll find the clues for tonight's puzzle below the fold...
First up, here's more about Sally Heathcote, Suffragette:
Sally Heathcote is a working-class maid in turn-of-the-century Manchester, in service to Emmeline Pankhurst, one of the leaders of the British suffrage movement. As Pankhurst is drawn to London and into further militancy as she strives towards her goals, we follow Sally as her eyes are opened to the possibilities to which throwing off injustice could lead.
Exploring this divisive time within the suffrage movement is no simple task, with pacifism discarded in favour of increasingly radical acts in the face of an uninterested and mocking government. Nor was the right to vote the only concern, as it was intertwined with the issues of rights for workers, equal pay, poverty, and healthcare, with men and women on both sides.
Talbot deals with these complexities with a deft hand, weaving a tale around fictional Sally that encompasses both the bright and dark moments of the movement. Sally visibly changes from a young and naïve girl, horrified at the behaviour of men and their entitlement, to one who is giving speeches of her own before baying crowds, carrying out acts of violence, and contemplating the militancy of her actions...
For those of you interested in a preview of the book, here's a link to some of the pages on
Mary Talbot's website.
And here [thank you for your patience!] are the clues for tonight's puzzle.
If you're familiar with how JulieCrostics work, have at it! If you're new and don't yet know how JulieCrostics work, you can find complete instructions in the bottom part of the diary.
Tonight's puzzle has 4 rows, with 3 answers per row.
1. pub drink
2. garden green
3. the same
4. encountered
5. be prolific
6. act (or overact)
7. children's game
8. annoying insect
9. thin and bony
10. negative
11. Griffith
12. like a beach
For the benefit of anyone new to Sunday Puzzle, here are instructions for solving JulieCrostics.
In JulieCrostics you are given a set of clues, such as these:
To solve the puzzle, figure out the answers to the clues and enter them into a grid of rows and columns, like so:
All the rows in the grid will be the same length (i.e. have the same number of answers). All the answers in a column will be the same length (i.e. have the same number of letters). And the words in each column are one letter longer than the words in the column to its left. That's because each word in a row has all the letters of the word before it plus one new letter.
For instance, if the clues for a row were
1. say what's not so
2. resting
3. concede
then the answers might be LIE, IDLE (= LIE + D), and YIELD (= IDLE + Y)
Write the added letter in the space between the word which doesn't have it and the word which does. For the row in the example you'd write:
1. LIE D 2. IDLE Y 3. YIELD
When you have solved all the clues and written down all the added letters, the added letters will form columns that spell out a message of some sort. It might be a person's name, it might be the title of a book, it might be a familiar phrase, or it might be a series of related words. Your challenge is to solve all the clues, fill in the vertical columns, and figure out what the vertical columns mean.
In the example given, the verticals read DAIL YKOS. With proper spacing and capitalization that spells out Daily Kos!