Solvers are presented with two alphabetized sets of 14 clues and a list of 14 names. Many of the clues are a bit odd: things like “Isthmus in the direction of,” or “The heavenly bodies,” that seem to clue only parts of prepositional phrases, or nouns with leading articles, and the like. Many of the left set of clues begin with “(The)”; none of the right set do.

The left clues each give the opening portion of a title, and the right clues the closing portion. This split means that the right-hand clues never have to deal with cluing a leading “The,” while the left-hand clues sometimes do. In those cases, the article is provided en clair, in parentheses.

Many of these answers should remind solvers of well-known titles from children’s literature. The list of names may ring similar bells, but the names given are not quite the names of the people who wrote the books. Instead, they are one author’s first name and another’s surname. These names are to be used to pair up the clue answers into smushed-together book titles (capitalized portions below):

The title suggests what to do next: take the complement of these titles, smushing together the unused (left) portion of the clues that were presented on the right with the unused (right) portion of the clues that were presented on the left. Doing this, you obtain:

The next step is indicated by the formatting and the flavor (“open and close”): find acrostics in the first and last letters reading MELANIN RICH DOT and HOT BLANK SUNDAE, respectively. MELANIN RICH DOT clues FRECKLE; HOT BLANK SUNDAY clues FUDGE. These are each halves of the titles of Judy Blume books: Freckle Juice and Superfudge. Repeating the use-the-complementary-part step, smush together SUPER and JUICE to obtain the puzzle answer SUPERJUICE.