With Whitney Gardner's summer 2025 middle grade graphic ghost and music novel Free Piano (Not Haunted, both the book title and the cover image are intriguing and as such they also piqued my reading interest even though I am not a huge graphic novel fan. But sadly, Free Piano (Not Haunted) did unfortunately end up kind of massively failing for me (and in particular for adult me), and indeed, that it has taken me almost two months to finish with Free Piano (Not Haunted), that I kept putting the book down due to a combination of boredom and frustration, this kind of speaks volumes and also leaves me pretty hugely disappointed as I was definitely looking forward to Free Piano (Not Haunted)).
Now Free Piano (Not Haunted) is in my opinion a typical so-called issue story, that what Gardner provides with both her text and equally so with her accompanying cartoons (which I do find aesthetically appealing with regard to colour and expressiveness) mostly (and actually for me solely) focuses on two main issues (namely on main protagonist Margot’s obsession with getting online followers regarding her music and then hopefully getting the attention of her absent musician father). But well, while Margot in Free Piano (Not Haunted) being both textually and illustratively shown by Whitney Gardner as trying to get her absent father to notice her and her musical talents is relatable and something both my inner child and adult I also totally understand, sorry, but Margot in Free Piano (Not Haunted) trying to get online followers is more than a bit boring, and is also for me personally as someone who was a teenager in the 1980s and has never been all that interested in social media, followers and the like something totally unrelateable and as such also really and massively boring and uninteresting, especially since in Free Piano (Not Haunted), social media and online followers seem to actually be more of a textual essential, rating higher than Margot's relationship with her absent and self-centred father (and frankly, that this should of course be totally and utterly the opposite).
And just to say that for both my inner child and also for adult me Free Piano (Not Haunted actually generally feels more like moralistic preachiness than an engaging story, with there being a very strict textual and pictorial caesura between what Gardner's words and her images show and declare is BAD and what is GOOD, with Margot wanting to learn how to play a synthesiser, posting videos of this online, getting many many online followers so that her father will watch this (become aware of this) and then be impressed of course being bad and that Margot needs to concentrate on being true to herself, playing her ukulele and not caring about online fame and even her father being impressed by her (and that this of course is or would be something good), all important and even essential of course, but shown by Whitney Gardner in Free Piano (Not Haunted) as totally on the surface, as totally one-sided and imbued with hugely annoying didacticism, and yes indeed, that even the "epic showdown" between Margot and the incarnation of corporate greed is kind of rather groan-worthy, also seems to materialise quasi out of the blue, out of thin air so to speak, so that for me (for both my inner child and adult me), Gardner's words and her images in and Free Piano (Not Haunted), this is all well and good to a point, but is in my opinion not really and truly a story but more like some kind of sermon or homily.
Thus while the haunted keyboard and ghostly 1980s one-hit wonder Vision mentoring Margot is kind of neat, does make me smile a bit and also makes Free Piano (Not Haunted) into something not altogether horrid (and into a story with potential), sorry, but there is just too much on the surface moralising present in Free Piano (Not Haunted) for me to consider more than two stars for the combination of Whitney Gardner's words and her cartoons, a high two stars to be sure, and that I do feel a bit guilty about not upping my rating to three stars. But well, if it takes me almost two months to tackle a middle grade graphic novel due to boredom and frustration with didacticism, then I really cannot and also should not consider a three stat rating for Free Piano (Not Haunted.