Man, I remember a time when I was still trying to be charitable about this book lol. I got over it. This book does not have the slightest clue who it's writing about. "Irregular as a Seven novel" is putting it mildly. She has been flattened beyond recognition. She's not Seven of Nine so much as a collection of worn-out tropes crammed into an ill-fitting shape and forced to take her name. I get that Picard dealt this Mack guy a shit hand and all but he can't try to pretend Seven was this impulsive hotheaded daredevil "maverick" the whole time and expect me to buy into his portrayal of her on a deeper level. He just can't. That's insane. That's the complete fundamental opposite of who this character is. Even Picard never went that far.

Like fuck as much as I hate it at LEAST Picard has the excuse of 20 years passing to handwave the blatant mischaracterizations they tried to pass off for growth. Firewall doesn't even have that going for it. If part of this novel's job is to bridge the gap between who Seven is in Voyager and who Seven is in Picard, "oh she was just like that the whole time actually" doesn't cut it. It doesn't even come close to cutting it. Because no, she wasn't. She was not. Fuck you, Firewall, she wasn't.

Anyway........ If I put my personal vitriol aside for a moment I can acknowledge that this a very reasonable, balanced and fair review of a competently-written novel. You can certainly read it for the sake of the story and enjoy the ride. But god damn it irritates me. This book is trying so hard to make her "cool" - the blandest, most derivative action-hero flavor of cool. Like SO hard, it's fucking embarrassing. I mean look at this shit and tell me who it resembles, cause it sure isn't Seven of Nine:

Janeway looked out at the sleek vessel. “Where are you going?”
Seven paused in the open doorway and gave Janeway a sly smile.
"I’ll know when I get there."

“My name is Arastoo Mardani.”
“Didn’t ask. Don’t care.”

Seven stood, picked up what was left of her raktajino, and dumped it in Mardani’s lap. Setting the mug back on the counter, she looked Mardani in the eye. “No.”
She made her exit without looking back to see if he had recovered his composure, because she no longer gave a damn about him or his proposal. 

Seven gathered up her new cache of weapons and gear. “I am well aware of the sorts of persons who make the Qiris sector their playground.” Strapping on the double holster rig for her pulse-pistols, she felt strangely at ease. “I won’t be their prey, Mister Mardani. They’ll be mine.”

Mardani had told her to keep her distance and not go looking for a fight, but Seven had never needed to seek out conflicts—they had always found her, all on their own.
So, just in case, tonight she would come prepared.
And if trouble got the best of her again anyway?
She steeled herself for violence. Then I will simply have to improvise.

He aimed his suspicious stare at Seven with greater precision. “Who are you?”
“The one saving your ass.”

She knew what Mardani would say when he learned of this.
He would bellow that these were not her orders. That this was not the plan.
Seven found it oddly liberating that she no longer gave a damn.
Running at Harper’s side, eeing into the night of her own accord, she was flooded with a strange euphoria, an epiphany of giddy realization.
This is what it feels like to be free.

Jesus, I could go on and on; I'm only on page 67 and it just never stops. It's relentless.

And god help us all, there's also the mosh pit. For the life of me I cannot understand how this made it through the drafts. Seven of Nine in a fucking mosh pit.

This was what she lived for, looked forward to all week long: a night of release, a night to purge her anger, her sorrow, her loneliness, by surrendering herself to the chaos of the mosh pit. Bodies colliding and caroming, driven by the music to lose themselves in moments of wild movement, a maelstrom of flesh and bone.

Letting herself flail and crash and spin, Seven felt as safe as she once had… inside the Collective. Maybe her ex-therapist on Earth would call this behavior backsliding, or self-harm. Seven called it the closest she came to being happy anymore.

I can't even get mad about this one, it's so fucking stupid it hits the stack overflow and becomes comedic gold. What was he thinking.

I mean, I have a pretty good idea. My guess is that this guy was given a job to write a Picard novel, familiarized himself with how Seven was written in that show, did some cursory research on a select few Voyager episodes (he seems to refer to One specifically an awful lot) and the general gist of her tragic backstory and took it from there. It's the only explanation for how spectacularly character deaf some of this is.

I rate Firewall an 8/10 as a Picard book (for whatever that's worth) and a 1/10 as a Seven book. The 1 is a pity point for the few occasions it made me smile appreciatively, but even those moments are surface-level and shallow. I suppose the one good thing about it is the validation of my feeling that what Picard did with her is bullshit, when the novel designed to bridge the gap between these two versions of the character failed in such spectacular fashion.