Book Was Easier to Follow

I bought and read the first book at a book store and liked it, feeling it had its own feel within the genre. Since I was no longer in Japan, rather than buying the next book, I started reading the matching material here. I'm obviously not a native speaker of Japanese, and that might be related... but I found it much easier to follow the plot and the characters in the first book than the subsequent episodes I've read here. There are a lot of new character names thrown around a lot, and for me it feels like I don't have enough context often to remember who is who. The story events also seem a bit more discontinuous than it felt in the book. Perhaps this is more of a first draft and the books get revised a bit (I didn't re-read the contents of the first book on this site).