Hi Cathy, In fiction, dialogue is preferable to blocks of solid text.
Readers are enticed by ‘open’ looking pages with lots of ‘white’ because they aren’t as daunting.

Another published author read through a novel of mine, prior to publication, and gave me one piece of great advice… ‘Show, don’t tell’. (Yes… one of the golden rules, but I’d let it slip).
If you need to give background details, and other ‘facts’, let them come out in conversation between the characters – even if you have to contrive a scene as an excuse for two to meet and talk. (but don’t make it feel like they are lecturing each other. People don’t talk like that).

Have them bounce questions and ideas off each other, so that the details you require the reader to know (as clues to a mystery, maybe?) get revealed in the questions and answers.
Even throwaway comments and jibes about other (absent) characters, and responses to those jibes can inform the reader. Writing these scenes can be a lot of fun.

There are readers (especially of action novels) who scan through the descriptive pieces to get to the action. They read dialogue because they perceive that to be ‘action’.

I had a test reader who liked a book but didn’t understand the ending (‘Who shot him?’, she asked.) I’d seeded the clues in the details, and she’d missed them by scanning. I went back into the novel and dropped in more clues and identifiers that hopefully the reader would remember when the time came.
Readers who read this way are more likely to pick up these pointers if they are given in dialogue.