The thing about extending media tie-ins beyond canon is that sometimes you have much less to play with. Here, many of the TNG crew are off on other postings, so it's just Picard and Crusher, really. There's advantages and disadvantages to this approach of course: part of the appeal of the tv series was in the characters and their interactions with each other, but there's something to be said for forcing them (and the readers) out of their comfort zones. 

Fittingly, the tone of the book is fairly melancholic, and that's mostly centred around Picard. He's about to have a new ship, but his life is looking very different. I quite enjoyed that very quiet storyline, which has something meditative about it. I think I would have liked it to be a little more of the book's focus - most of that focus is given up to an adventure story centred around plague and rebellion and Romulans, and there's nothing wrong with it, that particular storyline's decently written, but it never grabbed me as much as the internal stuff. The change, here was more interesting to me than the more-of-the-same, if that makes sense.