With unmatched skills of observation, I noticed the words "still" and "more" in the title and subtitle of Jeffrey Brown's Kids are Still Weird: & More Observations from Parenthood, from which I quickly deduced that this was a sequel to a previous book. And, sure enough, it wasn't hard to find evidence that Brown had published Kids are Weird: And Other Observations from Parenthood in 2014.

That discovery further led me to discover that Brown has also published Star Wars-themed parenting books that portray Darth Vader as an active parent to Luke and Leia (including Vader's Little Princess and Goodnight Darth Vader). That concept actually looks quite fun.

But Kids are Still Weird, while attempting to be a modern-day successor to Art Linkletter's classic Kids Say the Darndest Things, isn't all that amusing. Brown gives us exchanges such as the following between a father and son: "Did you go potty?" "I potty yesterday." "But did you go today?" "I not drink water anymore." By the end of this razor-sharp dialogue, the dad wears a big grin as if his son were the funniest thing on two legs -- an expression the father wears throughout the book.

In another four-panel sequence, the child says "Check out my ninja moves," then spends three panels making combat poses. That's it. That's the joke. A full-page splash shows the boy holding up his hand and asking his mother, "Why does your nose go like that? It's supposed to go like this." Go like what? The illustration provides no clue what the boy's gesture means.

Unfortunately, the children in this book just aren't as precocious or adorable as Brown seems to believe. The book isn't funny, nor is it poignant, nor insightful. The dialogue is never all that clever, nor cute.

By the end, I was wondering why this was published in the first place. I'm sorry, Jeff, but I don't see the point of it.