Seriously, You Have to Eat

Capitalizing on the success of his first picture book parody, Go the F**k to Sleep, Mansbach provides a cleaned-up version of its sequel, You Have to F**king Eat, a snarky takedown of juvenile eating habits (or the lack thereof). It must be asked, though: why remove the obscenities from a book aimed squarely at adults? A change like “How the hell are you growing/ when you basically don’t f***** eat?” to “How the heck are you growing/ When you basically don’t ever eat?” is merely cosmetic. And although the punch line, “For me a scotch, neat,” gets an allusive substitution (“For me, a drink that smells like peat”), the page retains its image of a child clinking her glass of milk with the parent’s tumbler. Brozman’s slick, Rotoscope-style spreads show many different adorably pouting children of various ethnicities refusing to eat. This at least lends a little inclusiveness to the verse, whose restaurant-dining, asparagus-eating paternal voice addresses only its own child. This is not a kid-friendly version of the book; it’s merely the original with the fun taken out of it. All ages. (Oct.)