By Miriam R. Kramer

The bittersweet Christmas novella Brightly Shining, by Ingvild H. Rishøi, became a bestseller throughout Europe after its release in Norway in 2021. Recently translated into English, it arrives just in time for the holidays. Told from the hopeful viewpoint of Ronja, a ten-year-old girl, the story is about broken lives, sibling love, and the figures and possibilities that loom large in a child’s eyes.

Ronja and her sixteen-year-old sister, Melissa, live a highly unstable existence with their father in the Oslo neighborhood of Tøyen. While loving, he is also a dysfunctional alcoholic. He has dry summers and holds jobs at a grocery store or a bakery, but then loses them after relapsing. He asks his daughters for forgiveness after he continually lets them down.

While Melissa takes on responsibilities such as putting off debt collectors, Ronja has inherited her father’s love for dreams and stories, along with an unquenchable sense of hope. When she finds a flyer listing jobs at a Christmas tree market, she brings it to him. After he gets the job, the inevitable occurs when his addiction gets in the way. Caught between humiliation and love for him, she sees him wandering around drunk near her school.

Melissa, forced to grow up before her time, decides to keep this job in the family. She professes no faith in people, including her father, or the future, although Ronja may be the one person she believes in and will do anything to help.

When she gets the physically difficult position at the market, her co-worker, Tommy, proposes a cynical and profitable idea. People will be more likely to buy Christmas greens from a sweet, skinny little kid, so Ronja is offered a job in which they will split the commission with Tommy. Ronja loves working after school because it keeps her from thinking difficult thoughts and feeling upset. She and Melissa are both bringing in money, and she will not have to spend time in an almost empty apartment with her father sleeping off a bender.

These are not the only people in her life. Ronja chats with her school caretaker, a refugee from the Balkans who shares his lunch and jokes with her, along with other looming figures from adulthood painted in different shades. One of the caretaker’s friends buys her a Christmas tree of her own. Her family’s landlord, who is worried about the family, lends a hand with her St. Lucia Christmas celebration. When her father is drunk one night, his inebriated friend gives her a pain pill, and her Muslim schoolfriend and his father try to take care of her as she wanders around outside in a state of delirium. The Christmas tree market’s owner, not often present, threatens both sisters. There is charm and humor in her relationships with some adults and pain or fear with others.

Throughout Brightly Shining, Ronja constantly thinks back to her dad’s favorite story of a log cabin, where you have to find the path between the snow-covered trees, see the lake and the hill where the fox has its den, and the fence you will follow to find it. To her it is a mythical place with snow and bright stars at night—a place where her father locks the door at night to keep them safe. She refers back to it as kids do when they ask to hear a favorite story, holding it in her mind as a talisman and the beacon of her hope for a miracle.

Ingvild H. Rishøi writes through Ronja’s eyes convincingly, letting us come to adult conclusions while absorbing the girl’s straightforward, innocent observations and fanciful ideas. I was reminded of the skill Emma Donoghue employed in the novel Room, in which she told the story of love between an imprisoned mother and her very young son through his eyes.

The author is also a beautiful, evocative writer who captures my attention completely. Luckily, the translator from Norwegian to English, Caroline Waight, has done her work with deftness and delicacy. This translation keeps the prose’s poetic rhythms and resonance intact.

Brightly Shining may be just the antidote to saccharine Christmas specials for people who see the holidays with conflicting emotions. If you appreciate Claire Keegan’s Christmas-time novella Small Things Like These, Shelby Lynne’s blues song “Xmas,” or Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Little Match Girl,” you will likely savor this atypical Christmas gift.