Stories for the child who needs to tell — and for the grown-up that child became.
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Harper J Jones writes in two rooms of the same house. In one, a picture-book series that gives young children the words, the plan, and the permission to speak up. In the other, a literary series for adults about a girl who had to keep telling long before anyone taught her how.
Why both
Two shelves. One belief.
The novels tell the truth about what happens to a child when no one listens. The picture books exist so that fewer children ever live that story. They were written by the same hand, for the same reason, and the children's series carries its dedication like a compass:
For the ones who told and had to tell again. For the ones who put down the pen or the phone, and listened.
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★ KEEP TELLING ★
Bravewords.Safe grown-ups.
They can't hear until you speak.
Stories that teach. Courage that lasts.
A picture-book series for young children, and for the parents, teachers, counselors, and coaches who read with them.
The idea
The child is the hero.
In the world of Keep Telling, ordinary helpers — a doctor, a teacher, a counselor, an officer, a coach — are heroes. But there is one rule that never breaks: their powers only switch on when a child speaks.
Grown-ups are the power that a child's voice unlocks. Every book in the series shows a child finding their voice, an adult who misses it the first time, and the child trying again — because the trying again is the whole point.
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Tell someone. If they don't listen — tell someone else. Keep telling until somebody helps.
The series refrain appears in every book, at the same moment, in the same hand-lettered treatment — so a pre-reader recognizes it on sight, and a reading child can chant it. Repetition is the intervention.
The tool at the heart of the series
The Safety Hand
Before anything is wrong, a child traces their hand and names one trusted person per finger. Five people they could tell — anything, even a hard thing, especially a hard thing. It's a fire drill, not a fire.
The Rules ✋
1You choose them. Nobody picks for you.
2One person can't live at your house. A teacher, a coach, a neighbor, a nurse.
3If one doesn't listen, that's not the end. You have four more.
4You can change your hand any time. People change.
5You never have to say why someone is on your hand — or why they're not.
A Safety Hand activity page appears at the back of every book in the series, and may be photocopied for personal, classroom, or counseling use.
Book one
Book One
Bo's Safety Hand
Bo is a bright, loud, dinosaur-loving seven-year-old. Loud at breakfast, loud on the bus, loud about dinosaurs and loud about socks. One day at school, Ms. Ivy has everyone trace a hand and name five people they could tell — anything, even a hard thing. Bo tapes his hand to the wall by his bed and doesn't think about it much. There isn't anything to tell.
Then there is.
When a secret becomes too heavy to carry, Bo goes to finger one — and learns the hardest, most important lesson in the series: sometimes the first grown-up doesn't hear you. And that is not the end. Bo keeps telling, finger by finger, until someone's power switches on.
Bo's Safety Hand handles body safety with honesty and enormous care — nothing is depicted, everything a child needs is named. The story ends the way every Keep Telling book ends: with a child who is not "fixed," but heard.
Includes the Safety Hand activity page and a two-page guide for grown-ups. Reviewed by a licensed child-safety professional prior to publication.
Book two
Book Two · Available now
The Kid Who Went Quiet
Sometimes the hardest thing to say… is something that happened to someone else.
Every Keep Telling book so far asks: what do you do when something happens to you? Book Two asks the other question — the one just as many children carry: what do you do when it's happening to someone else?
Told from a bystander's point of view, The Kid Who Went Quiet is about a child who notices what the grown-ups haven't yet — a classmate who used to be loud, and isn't anymore. It's about the difference between tattling and telling, why your Safety Hand works for your friends too, and what it means to be somebody else's brave voice until they find their own.
The refrain is the same. The hand is the same. This time, a child uses them for a friend.
Like every Keep Telling book, it includes the Safety Hand activity page and a caregiver guide — this one with guidance for talking to kids about bullying and peer harm.
Poppy is ten, and she is learning guitar. Dez drives her to lessons on Thursdays. He listens. He remembers her favorite milkshake. He makes her feel like the most special kid in the whole world.
Then the little secrets start.
Our Little Secret helps children learn the difference between a surprise — something everybody finds out — and a secret — something somebody never finds out. And it shows them exactly what to do the moment a grown-up asks them to keep one: there are no secrets from your Safety Hand.
In the series bible this is called the hardest book to write, and the most necessary. Trusted-adult characters children will recognize from across the Keep Telling series are here when Poppy needs them.
Ages 6–9 · 32 pages · Includes the Safety Hand activity page and a discussion guide for parents and caregivers.
Some games are just games. Some friends are not who they say they are.
Milo loves Skyward Racers. It's his game, his escape, his world. When a new player shows up with big gifts and kind words, Milo thinks he's found the best teammate ever. But beneath the laughs and victories, something doesn't feel right.
When Milo finally tells the truth, someone listens. His game stays. The danger doesn't.
A story for kids ages 6–9 about online safety, trusting your gut, and the brave choice to speak up — because real power is knowing when to speak, and who to tell.
Includes the Safety Hand activity page, a caregiver discussion guide, and resources on where to get help.
The heroes
Costumes fantastic. Powers human.
Every power in Keep Telling is something real adults actually do — because if the powers were magic, children would learn that helpers are magical, and the real ones would look too ordinary to try.
The Seer
Doctor · Nurse
Sees the hurt you haven't said out loud.
The Noticer
Teacher
Notices the change — spots the kid who went quiet.
The Believer
Counselor · Social worker
Believes you the first time.
The Stopper
Officer
Makes it stop.
The Steady
Coach · Librarian · Bus driver · Neighbor
Stays. Doesn't get tired of you. For most kids, the real lifeline is the one ordinary adult who keeps showing up.
Series rule: no hero can hear a child until the child speaks — and every story shows at least two reachable helpers, because no child's story should ever end at a single door.
The series
The books
Each book takes on one situation a child might face. The mechanism — the Safety Hand, the refrain, the second telling — repeats in every one, until it belongs to the reader.
1
Bo's Safety Hand
Book one
Introduces the Safety Hand and the refrain. Body safety, and why there are no secrets from your hand.
An adult who is kind, who gives gifts, and who asks a child to keep something from their hand. The hardest book to write, and the most necessary.
4
When Home Is Loud
In development
For the child whose problem lives at home. Every other book assumes home is a safe base — this one doesn't, because some readers need to see themselves on a page.
5
The Friend in the Game
Book five · Coming soon
Online safety and true friends. Milo's favorite game brings him a new teammate — with big gifts, kind words, and something that doesn't feel right.
6
I Kept Telling
In development
A child from an earlier book, later — showing that it took more than one try, and that trying again was the thing that worked.
Out in the world
Where these books belong
Story time, classrooms, and reading corners — anywhere a child might need the words.
For grown-ups
The back of every book is for you.
Every Keep Telling title closes with a caregiver guide, written plainly to the adult. Here is its heart.
Doing the Safety Hand at home
Do it before anything is wrong. It's a fire drill, not a fire.
Trace it together. Let your child name all five. Don't correct the list.
Don't be hurt if you aren't finger one. The goal is that your child has somewhere to go — including somewhere that isn't you.
Redo it every school year. Rooms change, people change.
If your child tells you something
Believe them out loud. "I believe you. I'm glad you told me." First words, every time.
Don't interrogate. Get the shape of it, then stop and call a professional.
Manage your own face. Horror or rage reads to a child as I have hurt my grown-up.
Never promise secrecy. Say "I'm going to get help, and I'll tell you every step."
Never ask "why didn't you tell me sooner." There is no answer that doesn't cost the child something.
Where to call
Childhelp National Child Abuse HotlineCall or text 800-4-A-CHILD (800-422-4453) · Available 24/7
National Children's AllianceHelps families locate Children's Advocacy Centers — nationalchildrensalliance.org
A story of true determination and a little bit of grit.
Autofiction for adult readers — real life rendered as literature, in the lineage of writers who trust the truth of experience over the tidiness of memoir.
The series
One life. Four books.
Wren was three years old the first time she cleaned her mother off a bathroom floor. She has spent most of her life at the crack in a door — watching, learning, escaping, seeing what she wasn't meant to see. The Imperfections of Hope follows her from that floor to freedom: a child forced to become a caretaker, an escape artist punished again and again for reaching toward the world and never once stopping, and a woman who carried her capacity to love out the other side intact.
It was a safety plan the world never gave her — so she kept slipping through every door herself, and saving everything she could.
It is a story with real darkness in it, told with warmth, dry wit, and an unbroken line of joy: the animals she rescued the way no one rescued her, the horses that gave her a spine, and the kind ones the world kept sending — proof, in a story this dark, that light finds its way through the crack.
Book One
The Crack in the Door
The rug in the bathroom was pink, and it was the softest thing in the house. That is where Book One begins — with a small girl, a needle that did not belong on the rug, and a mother who told her to be a good little girl and go to her room.
The Crack in the Door carries Wren from her first memory to the night, at nineteen, when the thing that had been chasing her all her life finally catches up — and she turns around. In between are the locked rooms and the slipped-through doors; the strangers whose kitchens had food when home had none; the men who protected her and the men who didn't; the kitten who crossed two buildings to find her; the first time she unsnapped a lead rope and discovered what freedom felt like at a gallop.
It ends on a single held breath. Everything after it is a different woman.
The child who survived — from the bathroom floor to the night she stops running.
A Different Woman
In progress
The years of becoming — stages and cabarets, marriage and motherhood, the safe love she could not learn to keep, and the oldest pattern reasserting itself just when she thought she was free of it.
A Stronger Version
Forthcoming
The Texas years — building an extraordinary life, and finally closing the one door that mattered most.
What Was Always Meant To Be
Forthcoming
The reckoning, the grandchildren, the late loves and late losses — and the woman telling the whole story at last.
Signing copies of The Crack in the Door.
A note for readers: this series is for adults. It deals honestly with child abuse, addiction, and domestic violence. Nothing is rendered graphically for its own sake — but nothing is softened into a lie, either. If you or a child you know needs help, resources are listed in the footer of this site.
About
Harper J Jones didn't set out to be a writer. She set out to survive, and she got good at it. The Imperfections of Hope is the four-book autofiction series she started once she finally had the distance to look back — drawn from a childhood most people wouldn't believe and a grown-up life she's still a little surprised she got to have.
She also writes the Keep Telling picture books, beginning with Bo's Safety Hand — gentle, plainspoken books that give kids the words she didn't have and give grown-ups the second chance somebody should have given her. The two shelves are really one story, told at two ages.
These days she lives in Texas with more animals than sense, a houseful of kids who beat the odds, and grandbabies who just know her as Nana. She'll tell you she's lived about five lives in one — and she's finally telling it straight.
The writing life — coffee, notebooks, and the Keep Telling mug.
— with love and grit,
Stay in touch
For news about new books, school and library resources, and release dates:
Be the first to know — about new books in both series, cover reveals, signings and school visits, and free Safety Hand printables for home and classroom.
Release news for Keep Telling and The Imperfections of Hope
Early cover reveals and behind-the-scenes peeks
Free printable Safety Hand activity pages for parents, teachers, and counselors
Event and signing announcements
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