We live in a world that has been radically altered by technology, and there is no turning back. Just as it is hard to see the night stars in cities thanks to the glare of urban lights, it is difficult to communicate or commune with our children when they are immersed in electronic gear of all types.
This clever children's picture book, designed for all ages really, depicts a home filled with digital gadgets. All the bunnies "in the bright buzzing room" are focused on their devices or the giant HD Wi-Fi 3-D TV with six remotes. Granny's patience has run out. She cannot sleep amid "the bings, bongs, and beeps of e-mails and tweets." So she takes radical action and begins tossing all of the devices out the window, bidding them "goodnight" as they hit the ground outside. The distraught bunnies cannot believe what she's doing. Gone is the light of iPads, Nooks, laptops, Blackberrys, a viral clip of a cat doing flips, Netflix streams, and a screen saver of an Angry Bird.
At last, peace and quiet.
Author and illustrator David Milgrim has taken the pen name of Ann Droyd to write this parody of Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon, a 1947 children's classic which has sold more than five million copies. What a difference there is between the soothing calm of lights out in Brown's book versus the drastic steps which have to be taken to retrieve children from their plugged-in kingdoms and get them to bed in Milgrim's book.
The only sweet thing in Goodnight iPad is the idea of saying goodnight to all our digital devices — not in anger — but in respect for all they have done for us and meant to us.
