So Who Needs a White Stepmother? : CLOVER<i> by Dori Sanders (Algonquin Books: $13.95; 183 pp.) </i>

Dori Sanders’ first novel has a powerful story line, told in the voice of a 10-year-old black girl, Clover, whose father dies in a car accident only hours after marrying a white woman. Sara Kate hasn’t even been married long enough to get used to her new name, Mrs. Hill, when she moves into her dead husband’s house, keeping her promise to take care of his daughter, Clover. In the small community of Round Hill, S.C., where people are bonded by history and superstition, Sara Kate looks and acts like a stranger. She has unfamiliar rituals and asks obvious questions.

Clover has to make major adjustments--accept her father’s marriage and death, as well as the disappointment that the surprise her father promised her is not the purple bicycle she hoped for, but a white stepmother. “Looks like anybody who knows the story about Cinderella should know that nobody in the world would want a stepmother unless they were all the way crazy,” says Clover’s Aunt Everleen, one of Sanders’ most vivid major characters, who refers to Sara Kate as “some fancy woman.”

An interesting aspect of the novel is Sanders’ treatment of time. From the first sentence on, it is evident that Clover’s idealized father, Gaten, is doomed. His courtship and wedding--told in flashbacks--take on a different dimension: The celebration is tinged with a sense of loss and pain.

Sanders is successful in staying within the immediate language that is accessible to a child, creating a voice that is authentic and clear: “We take the silence outside to waiting shiny black cars.” Dressed in white for her father’s funeral, Clover jabs herself with a thorn: “I turn my finger into a paint brush. The blood makes a round dot on my white dress. I keep adding to it until it almost becomes a flower.” She is aware of the ritual of the funeral, a play in which everybody plays a part.

Her Aunt Everleen, who sells peaches from the family’s orchard at her fruit stand, has prepared Clover for a spelling bee and has encouraged her sketching talent. She resents the white woman who is taking her role in the child’s life and competes with her for Clover’s affection. She tells Clover that “all white women give money to the animals if they have it to spare . . . because they feel so guilty over the way their people treated us.”

Clover makes up her own mind about her stepmother despite her aunt’s reaction and develops a loyalty which she proves through silences. But instead of taking us into the rich and muddled conflict of the girl, Sanders analyzes the changing relationship between Clover and Sara Kate in psychological terms like “fear of not being accepted.”

Clover worries that the townspeople will interpret her acceptance of her stepmother as turning against them, but after Sara Kate rescues her Uncle Jim Ed, the town begins to accept her too, even Everleen, who rebukes Clover when she is rude to her stepmother.

Sanders creates unforgettable walk-ons, relatives who only appear briefly but are described in vibrant and unique detail: Cousin Amphia, who loses her teeth at the family picnic and whose bright red toenails look “as if she painted them with a spray can,” and Cousin Lucille, who dresses like a clown and who buys a frizzy wig to replace the one that “caught on fire while she was bending over a gas burner.”

In contrast, Sanders’ major characters lack that richness. They seem vague. Their experiences affect them, but only on superficial levels. Throughout the novel, Sanders states that Clover and Sara Kate are sad. “I hope Sara Kate is not sad she . . . ended up with me. I hate it when she is sad like that . . . most of the time, I’m sad also. Really sad.”

Despite its strong qualities, Sanders’ first novel does not fulfill its potential. It stays on the surface, linking a sequence of events without showing the reverberations. The deeper layers are not revealed, and the ending offers a sense of closure that glosses over the genuine conflicts.

Sanders wants to convince her readers that, for Clover, “it’s almost like old times.” The healing is too easy--just as the pain was not fully explored.