THIS IS THE KEY TO THE KINGDOM

Allison's mistily impressionistic pen-and-watercolor double spreads set a familiar nursery chant in an idyllic world that a black child enters through an arched door on a rundown urban street. The lovely kingdom within burgeons with flowers and wildlife; the city is full of people happily reading, engaged in the arts, or talking together, references repeated as the child moves through town to a warmly welcoming house where she finds a bed with ``a basket of...sweet flowers.'' As the verse reverses (``bed in the room, room in the house...''), the child retraces her steps, emerging, with a dream in her eye, into her own city street, where she gives the single flower she still carries to an old street musician. A charmingly imaginative pictorial expansion that aptly suggests the elusive wealth of meaning in these haunting traditional words. (Folklore/Picture book. 4-8)