My friend has asked me to give feedback on a light novel that he's writing, and I've been clueless on how to proceed. I'm an avid reader of non-fiction, and although I don't read much fiction anymore, I've had to analyze numerous books and short stories for some classes that I was taking. Suffice to say, I felt that I would be able to help, but when reading the text, the style and mood were so alien to me that I felt incapable of giving any good advice.
To give some background, the light novel falls within the fantasy genre and tries to explore the depths of human emotion through abuse, neglect, illness, etc., however, it also has a very unrealistic nature to it, in that it has a wacky sense of humor and sometimes cringe-worthy cliches.
I haven't read a light novel before, but these seem like very strange stylistic/mood choices to me when trying to write something that is dark and profound, so my main question is whether this is typical of popular light novels such as "Sword Art Online" or of the art form as a whole. Furthermore, how does the style/mood/themes of light novels differ from that of more traditional novels?
I've looked around on Stack Exchange and I've found some answers that touch on these differences, but don't really mention style/mood. I've also looked online and it seems as though many light novels contain some of the aspects I explained above, but I wasn't able to find anything concrete.