Christopher L. Bennett

Truly 2.5 stars rather than two.
The Buried Age gives us the story of Picard's life between the captaincy and loss of the Stargazer, up until the very beginning of TNG. Fantastic premise, great backstory that ST fans would love to have. Sadly, the execution is spotty and the story itself runs a lot longer than it needs to for the amount of plot we get.
The beginning of the book, detailing the loss of the Stargazer and survival of its crew is fantastic. As is the end up the book detailing Picard's taking command of the Enterprise. Characterization is spot on, we get some important plot elements, and it moves along at an acceptable pace. Following the loss of the Stargazer, Picard temporarily leaves starfleet. I don't love this as a plot point given his later anxiety over this same decision post-Wolf 359, but his shift back to working in the field of archeology still feels in character. There's definitely fat to trim in this section, as well as throughout his ensuing romance with an alien of a previously undiscovered race while researching a galaxy wide extinction event in pre-history, but it still moves along okay.
I think the real failing is somewhere between 2/3rd and 3/4s of the way through the page count. There's been a big twist with the archeological research and romance, most of the main and sub-plots are suitably resolved, we've hit climax, passed on into denouement...and yet the story keeps going? There's significant chunk there were it could have skipped straight to setting us up for the start of TNG with no significant impact on the story, but it just, keeps, going. Imagine if after the end of the of a well crafted episode of trek, before the credits, you had about 15 minutes of additional filler. Between that and fat trimming for earlier, this could easily have come in 50-100 pages shorter, which leaves the impression that maybe the author was padding it.… (mere)