Broken Children, Broken Lives : ONE DARK BODY, <i> By Charlotte Watson Sherman (HarperCollins: $20; 209 pp.)</i>

Novels that take readers into worlds they have only glimpsed briefly, tangentially through a door slightly ajar, through a torn window curtain, through an unguarded exchange are rare gifts. They can sometimes leave readers breathless, feeling on the brink of discovery unexplored by most people.

That is how “One Dark Body,” Charlotte Watson Sherman’s ambitious first novel, leaves the reader feeling, as if she has glimpsed a sliver of a fascinating world dusted with magic.

In most American small towns in earlier decades of this century, there always seemed to be a structure, never the best-built or sturdiest or finest in the neighborhood, that housed an assembly of various children. Sometimes, the children were from all branches of the same family tree. And sometimes, the children were from what truly looked like a broken home--all colors and shapes and faces and shades of the African-American human family.

Raisin is one of those “broken” children. A dark, wrinkled, little 12-year-old, she was left at birth in her mama Nola’s hometown of Pearl, Wash., a mystical little town on the edge of a black lake with suffocating, entrapping coal mines on its outskirts. There she lives in the care of Miss Marius and her loving household of abandoned, nearly aborted, unwanted-for-the-time-being children--all waiting for the mothers who are supposed to “come back for ‘em.”

Raisin sleeps with the other children, MC Wilhelmina and Douglass, in the back bedroom of Miss Marius’s house that they share with the big-boned bully Lucille. And although she doesn’t admit it, Raisin, too, awaits the return of her mother, Nola.

A note comes from Chicago for Miss Marius saying: “Things sure do change, so do people. What goes around comes around in a hurry they say. I’m coming around there for my child.”

Nola is coming back for Raisin, like the note says, and its message, along with Nola’s arrival on a train from Chicago, sends her daughter and everyone in the town who has been touched by her, into a slow-motion, near-mystical tailspin:

Raisin begins to hear whispers seeping up from the dirt roads beneath her as she starts to question her place on this earth--who she is and who her mother is. Her friend Sin-Sin searches for his dead father and his own manhood in rituals with Blue-the-Wanga-man, a shaman-like outcast who lives in the woods surrounding the lake. Nola wrestles with memories of her own mother as she struggles with the responsibilities of, and her own identity as, a mother. Nola also fights with the memory of her dead lover, who refused to go underground in the local mines to earn a living for his woman and their unborn child.

Watson Sherman, a writer of short stories, has taken on the necessary expanded elements of the novel with “One Dark Body,” but she still has not given herself enough room to move around. The book jacket copy states that this novel is a story of Raisin, Nola, of the spirits of El, Raisin’s father, and Ouida, Nola’s mother. The copy goes on to say that “One Dark Body” is also the story of Sin-Sin, Raisin’s Brazilian, agate-colored friend who is on the cusp of manhood, his mother and father, and of Blue-the-Wanga-man. Clearly, “One Dark Body” is too much of a story, too wide-ranging and mystical a story to fit into the author’s 209 pages. Even as you read, you continue wanting more. More explanation, more dialogue, more time to enjoy and get to know these people of Pearl.

Watson Sherman’s style has a beautiful if inchoate lyrical flow, with well-thought-out spiritual imagery, that sometimes hits the mark dead-on:

“She’d sit and listen to the sermons of the preaching birds and mosquitoes, the crackling old tree branches . . . communion broken only when she pulled a struggling streak of silver from the water to take home and clean for her evening meal.”

Sometimes, the style overreaches and misses as in scenes of sexual intensity that rely on the stale language of romance novels--”his sweet searching tongue.”

Yet, the author clearly displays a style and a vision that will make readers look forward to her next longer work of fiction.