Ron Charles's Reviews > Brightly Shining

Charles Dickens didn’t invent Christmas, of course, but he left Tiny Tim’s crutch lying in the hallway for everybody else to trip over. Since 1843, writers have been limping along after the master storyteller, trying to catch a mugful of his ginger-infused sentimentality. For many of us, there is no shorter line to the tear ducts than a child’s imperiled hope for a merry Christmas.

Truman Capote redecorated the tree in 1956 with his tender story about making fruitcakes with his elderly cousin. “We are each other’s best friend,” the narrator explains as they begin gathering “cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisin and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings.” I don’t even like fruitcake, but I crave their fruitcake. And that final forlorn paragraph of “A Christmas Memory” — “severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself” — still throbs with nostalgia like a childhood scar.

“Brightly Shining,” a new novella from Norwegian writer Ingvild Rishoi, belongs to that contra-Dickens genre that wreathes holiday joy with sorrow. It’s not as perfect as Claire Keegan’s 2021 Christmas novella, “Small Things Like These,” but perfection makes for an unfair comparison.

O, come, all ye faithful, to have your hearts broken again.

Rishoi’s story takes place, as such stories must, in the redolent realm of childhood memory. Ronja is a clever 10-year-old girl in Oslo as the city prepares for Christmas. She’s a dreamer and a lover of tales, a preference that’s encouraged by her alcoholic father, who supplies the household with little else. The narrative, translated from th....

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