Yes on repetition…here is the thinking and I may be wrong…
If you have read the book as intended (continuously as one long book) or have read the first one many times, then this is annoying overkill.
However, if this really is a “Book 2” instead of “Volume II” (which most people will treat it as) and you haven’t read in 6 months, a year or longer than this is “refresher information” it’s part of bringing readers back up to speed.
It is actually something that I have seen in numerous later books, near the beginning of the books, you sort or restate stuff that would be obviously if you were “binge watching”
It is sort of a literary “previously on” without being so in your face.
I am trying to re-comfort readers back into my universe who have been absent for some time.
TV series (in particular soap operas/telanovelas) do this sort of thing a lot for the casual viewer.
Netflix original series almost never do anything like this as they assume you are binge watching.
So the question that comes up with something like this: Do I leave it in as a reminder to casual readers, or do I take it out as an annoyance to dedicated rereaders?
Is the second quote/issue about “awkward sentence structure” or more of the “you are repeating who Talarius is and what just happened 10 minutes ago”