I did rather enjoy “user-generated” as a clever anagram-fodder-plus-anagram-indicator. STELLA required a bit of list-scouring, as well, and it didn’t help that I couldn’t unsee “Sheila” from the crossing letters, that having been my first guess. ![]() The setter acknowledges in the comments on the original Fifteensquared blog that it is perhaps not his best. ![]() I suspect that if I had not been blogging I would have given up. I got this only after a fair bit of list-trawling and dictionary-delving. ![]() The exception was PEARLER, my last one in. The cluing was splendid – with one exception – and this was just the sort of puzzle that I like chewy, but enjoyable (what I think of, topically, as a treacle-toffee crossword). Given the grid, I was expecting a nina or some other gimmick, but to my surprise there is nothing hidden away anywhere. This all adds to the challenge of the puzzle. More than half of the entries do not have crossing initial letters, and more than half (just) of the squares in total do not cross with other entries. The grid is a bit of a Brompton, with only two squares linking the left and the right hemispheres, and within those, only two connecting the tops and the bottoms. ![]() Several factors combine to make this a challenging crossword, artful cluing being but one of them. Difficulty rating (out of five): □□□□
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