This is just an American flag, poking out of the ground in front of what is just a brick building, and this could be anywhere, really. Image: Little Brown and Company The War Outside Chapter 4 Here's an exclusive peek at the cover of Monica Hesse upcoming book 'The War Outside' I kept thinking, 'We’ve had these conversations before.' We had these exact conversations in 1941, and then we imprisoned more than a hundred thousand people.' 'After I'd been working on The War Outside for a few months, the current White House started talking about travel bans and holding ICE raids,' she said. 'The country was having very real discussions about what made someone an American. However, Hesse says the story in the book parallels current events happening right now in modern America. The War Outside is historical fiction, set in the not-too-distant past. I kept wondering what it would be like to be a young person dragged into this: trying to have a normal life when your country says you're an enemy.' 'Once I started reading about this particular camp in Texas - Crystal City, the only internment camp to imprison both Japanese American and German American families - I couldn’t stop.

'I knew about the internment of Japanese Americans already, but then I found references to the imprisonment of German Americans, too, which is something I had no idea happened,' says Hesse.

However, as time stretches on, and the dynamic of camp changes, the two begin to rely on each other as everything they know starts to fall apart. When they meet at the camp's school, Haruko and Margot believe that they'll only know each other, and only stay in Crystal City, for a short amount of time. In her upcoming second novel, titled The War Outside, Hesse traces the lives of two teens - Haruko and Margot - who are uprooted from their lives and placed in Crystal City, a family internment camp in west Texas, because they're parents are German and Japanese. SEE ALSO: Cheeky bookseller proves that Trump's own words are the best way to sell the book about him

Now Hesse is back, and she's revisiting an aspect of WWII that's not frequently discussed: the interment of Japanese Americans and German Americans. In her first book, Girl In The Blue Coat, Hesse delivered a nail-biting deep dive into World War II, following a black marketeer in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam who is suddenly tasked with finding a missing Jewish teenager. Monica Hesse's books are like time machines - vehicles that help us explore our past.

The war outside by monica hesse