STAYING HOME ALONE ON A RAINY DAY

Staying home alone on a rainy day is a frightening experience for a little girl whose mother had promised ""she'd be back soon""; it's also a very concrete title for a very vaporous book. On pages that simulate the texture of canvas are watercolors that are sometimes deft sketches of Allison cringing (""Please stop ringing,"" she says to the telephone) or absorbed in drawing pictures on the window panes, sometimes wet wash impressions of how she feels or of what she sees transfigured. It's a risky technique, sublimating subject matter to subjectivity, and in a few cases it fails to ommunicate: while Allison is watching two fish in a fishbowl, what appears to be an upended, particolored umbrella thrusts into a sea of green from which two shadowy white fish-like forms emerge. The allusiveness becomes complete abdication on the last page when Allison finally sees ""Mother, her arms full of packages. . . running"" and we see a blank gray page. Some of it is quite lovely to look at, all of it (except the telephone) is rather remote.