One of Watermark Publishing’s authors, Frances H. Kakugawa, started a dialogue with Charles Pellegrino, author of The Last Train from Hiroshima, a book which earlier this year received a great deal of attention for not-so-good reasons. Think James Frey-Oprah Winfrey-A Million Little Pieces-attention.

Frances, a former Hawaii public school educator, felt a very personal connection with Pellegrino’s Last Train, which chronicles the experiences of some of the survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bomb—her parents’ families perished at Hiroshima. When she discovered that there was some controversy over whether the survivors’ accounts were true or not (one of Pellegrino’s sources turned out to have duped the author), she posted an open letter to the author on her blog expressing her dismay.

To her surprise, Pellegrino wrote back to her.