Jam Session! Jampires by Sarah McIntyre

Jam for breakfast, jam on bread.

Lunch and dinner, jam in bed.

Sam is a jam fan. And when it comes to donuts, no goopy glazed donuts for him. His favorite is the jam-filled Berliner.

Full of jam, one night Sam leaves one donut beside his bed for a quick bite when he wakes. But in the morning, he finds only a dry, wizened shell of his Berliner. Bummer!

"THERE'S NO JAM!" YELLED SAM.

"THIS DONUT IS JAMLESS!"

SOMEONE GOT TO THE DONUT BEFORE ME AND SUCKED OUT THE JAMINESS!"

But Sam is not one to take this sneaky jam scam lying down. Taking his deflated donut to the kitchen, he pulls out Mom's Tupperware squeeze ketchup bottle and injects the red stuff back into it through the side-by-side puncture holes. With a wire waste can, he fashions a trap and sets it up to capture the crooks. At bedtime he sets up a stakeout, but eventually falls asleep, until a hullaballoo wakes him up.

"YUCK!"

CLANG!

NOT ONE THIEF, BUT TWO! AND THERE MIGHT BE A GLIMMER OF A FANG!

Yikes! Vampires? Nope. Jampires, caught red-handed, (and red-fanged), and clearly grossed out by Sam's ketchup filling.

Sam is sympathetic with his captives. After all he's a fan of strawberry jam, too. And he feels sorry for the little lost jampires, so far from home. All's well that ends well, as Sam guides the little jampires back home, where they all chow down on some fancy filled donuts freshly made by the grateful jampire mamas, in Sarah McIntyre's sweet rhyming tale, Jampires (Scholastic Press, 2015). Artist David O'Connell provides the cutesy little cat burglars that will have youngsters tickled at Sam's catch in a silly, not-scary story for the spooky season.