This is Rough Translation from NPR. I'm Gregory Warner. My friend Jake Halperin wears a lot of hats

He's written an investigative nonfiction for the New York Times and the New Yorker

He's a podcaster and he writes young adult novels. He also teaches people at a right YA on the very first class

I make the everyone sit on the floor and

I just had them like look around and see what underneath the table looks like and

And it's because I as a kid I always remember like hiding under the dining room table and

Thinking that was such an amazing world while the people's legs and their feet and the carpet and it was just a completely different way to see

Your house and to think about what an adventure could be

In the kind of adventures that Jake imagines in his novels those table legs

Become the trunks of giant redwoods with a canopy of leaves so thick. You can't see the sky

The carpet becomes a mossy forest floor and the grown-ups legs under the table become monsters

lurking

Yeah, the kind of veneer of childhood kind of falls away this idea that life is

good and and society is there and parents are there

The kids are left to fend for themselves and figure it out for themselves

Now in 2016 Jake started working on a new book about a kid left to fend for himself in a war zone

dodging bullets scrapping from metal all while trying to protect his younger siblings from being killed

Only the kid in this story was a real boy named Najee who lived through a war in Syria before arriving to the US

Okay Najee tell me where we are right now. Well, I mean like we're in Westopthode Connecticut and

You're sitting outside and a nice weather

The interview you're hearing took place this year Najee is 19 years old now

But when Jake first met him Najee had just arrived to the States and he was just a kid skinny quiet didn't yet speak English

...