The Owner's Manual to Terrible Parenting

Putting aside his previous career as a graphic memoirist with an uncommon knack for fish-out-of-water travel tales, Delisle (Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City) has embarked on a new identity as amusing parental anecdotalist (A User's Guide to Neglectful Parenting). In his latest, Delisle presents a series of vignettes in which he endlessly annoys and perplexes his young son and daughter for humorous effect. Delisle has always affected a hapless comic persona, the guy who blunders into situations he's woefully unprepared for, and this time is no different. Only now, instead of getting in trouble on the West Bank or with the North Korean authorities, he's annoying his daughter by slipping grammar lessons into their nightly reading of Harry Potter or feeling insecure after his son outdoes him in piloting a remote-controlled toy. The stakes might be lower, but Delisle's clean drawing and sarcastic, self-deprecating humor are as finely tuned as ever. (Oct.)