Explaining too much

I just finished a book on my Nook app for my iPad called “The Mating” by Nicky Charles. It was recommended to me by a friend, and the storyline is okay. It’s been done, but it was okay. However, I had two real problems with it.

First of all, she explained too much. There were so many times during the story where she should have just let the reader infer things from the scene, but instead she felt the need to add between one to three sentences explaining what I already knew. For example, the book is about werewolves, and it’s mostly a romance between Elise and the Alpha male of the pack. There is one scene where she goes to get her bags from the vehicle (they’ve just been married and she’s moving in) and he tells her not to worry about it. Others will take care of it. Immediately several other guys go to grab her things and carry them into the house.

The author should have left it right there. Everyone who knows wolf packs (or is into novels about werewolves) knows the Alpha is always obeyed. Even if you didn’t know that, you could infer it from the situation and their actions. However, the author felt the need to add a sentence explaining how the Alpha’s word was to be absolutely and immediately obeyed.

There is a fine line between not explaining enough, explaining just enough and explaining too much. I often fall on the side of not explaining enough. I think explaining too much disrupts the story just as much as not explaining enough, if not more, and it frustrated me while reading this novel.

Secondly, commas were in the randomest places, in the sentences and there were no commas where they should have been. (Please note this last sentence; it demonstrates what I’m talking about.) Talk about disrupting a sentence! I had the worst time reading it. I know that sometimes when a book is made into an e-format, things can get messed up like that. Still, this happened too many times to have all been from the reformatting,

I don’t mean to rag on this woman’s novel. The story, once I got into it, was interesting, but I just couldn’t get past these things. Has anyone else ever come across a book like this that they had problems with?