May I Bring a Friend?
by Beni Montresor
Summary
A well mannered young boy is invited, again and again, to visit the king and queen for tea, and each time he asks whether he might bring a friend along, a request the king and queen always grant without knowing quite what they are agreeing to. True to his word, the boy shows up on each visit with an animal guest instead of a human one, a giraffe on Sunday, a hippopotamus on Monday, a troop of monkeys on Tuesday and so on through the week, each one displaying exactly the same careful manners the boy himself has, so that by the story's end the king and queen have hosted an entire menagerie without a single mishap. The following Saturday the animals return the favor, inviting the king and queen to tea at the zoo, closing the book on the biggest, friendliest gathering yet.
Beni Montresor, who spent most of his career designing sets and costumes for opera houses including the Metropolitan Opera and La Scala, brings a theatrical, jewel bright sensibility to the illustrations, richly patterned and lavishly colored in a way reviewers at the time singled out by name when the book won its medal, the king and queen's palace staged almost like an opera set with each new animal guest making its own grand entrance. It is a short, rhythmic, repeating text well suited to the very young, roughly three to six, since the pattern of question, answer and new animal guest is easy for a child to predict and join in on by the second or third repetition, and the parade of increasingly improbable guests gives an adult reading it aloud plenty of room to ham up each new arrival.
Historical Context & Significance
May I Bring a Friend?, written by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers and published by Atheneum on September 8, 1964, won Montresor the 1965 Caldecott Medal, cited specifically for the illustrations' jewel like quality. That year's Honor books were Marvin Bileck's Rain Makes Applesauce, Blair Lent's The Wave and Evaline Ness's A Pocketful of Cricket. De Regniers had already published her debut book, The Giant Story, illustrated by Maurice Sendak, back in 1953, and went on to write more than fifty books across a career spent largely as the founding editor of Scholastic's Lucky Book Club from 1961 onward, fitting her own writing into the rest of the week around that job.
Montresor's own career ran mostly through the opera house rather than the nursery. Alongside American picture books he designed productions worked on with Federico Fellini and Broadway shows including Do I Hear a Waltz? and Rags, served as artistic director of Rome's opera house in the late 1980s, and was knighted by the Italian government in 1966 for his contribution to the arts.