Joey's Chair

This plodding picture book seems like nothing so much as a thinly camouflaged marketing tool for a child-sized chair that is being offered by the publisher. Joey's pickle-puss baby-sitter insists he stay inside while she knits and drones out repetitious stories. Joey falls asleep and dreams that the large, uncomfortable wooden chair he's been forced to sit on has metamorphosed into-drumroll, please-a soft, cozy ``just his size'' chair that can fly. It whisks him from an unidentified locale to Australia, where a pack of friendly kangaroos plays with him and tells him stories. When he awakens back at home, he tells his grumpy baby-sitter of his adventures, her heart of stone melts and she smilingly sends him outdoors to play. The pedestrian prose is teamed with garish, cartoonlike illustrations for a result that is both transparent in its intentions and stupefyingly dull. Ages 1-5. (Aug.)