Nakos's approach to literature is pragmatic; she believes that it should enlighten and give hope to its readers. Thus her novels can be seen as social documents, exposing the hardships of working people, of exploited children, and of women. Moreover, certain of her works were written with specific social purposes. Her collection of stories, The Children's Hell [also published as The Children's Inferno], alerted the world to the great famine in Athens during the German Occupation of World War II, and Toward a New Life exposes the abuses of the Metaxas dictatorship in Greece which immediately predated that war. Yet all her novels, while accurately portraying difficult, even wretched, social conditions, end on optimistic notes and reaffirm hope that things will get better.

Nakos's novels are romantic. The characters, especially in the earlier works, are monolithically good or bad. Nakos is particularly adept at portraying extreme swings of emotion so that sudden events hurl characters into exhilaration or despair. She has developed an accustomed structure that lends itself to this pattern, whereby the protagonist experiences two psychological low points, one in the middle of the book, and one just before the end, but from both of which she is precipitously saved.

If Nakos's works are grouped, they fall out something like this: The early work includes the short stories written in French and, in some cases, later rewritten in Greek; the novella The Deflowered One (originally published in French in 1928); Nakos's first full-length novel The Lost (1935); and the short stories written in Greek at about the same time as The Lost. In these works the protagonists are little girls or young women, innocent helpless victims in bleak environments, perpetually alone, and love is nothing but a source of torment.

The World War II period includes the stories of The Children's Hell and the novels Boetian Earth and Toward a New Life, in sequence. Here the focus is on renewed commitment to Greece and interest in its heritage. Although the heroine of the two novels is a young woman not unlike the earlier heroines, she is able to make somewhat satisfying connections to other people, and she feels a pride in Greece in addition to the anger sparked by the way Greece makes her people suffer.

The two works that Nakos wrote in French after she moved to Switzerland in 1947, and later rewrote in Greek, are anomalous in a number of ways. The slim, lyrical novella Nafsika is much more like the works of the early period than those written later. Its heroine is an unhappy, alienated little girl living with her gentle but miserable mother in Marseilles. The tone of this work, like the early works, is an agonized wail at the injustice in the world and consequent human suffering. Its message is "Never love a man." Mrs. Doremi is as different in tone as can be, it is Nakos's only comic novel, based on her year teaching at a boys' high school in Rethymnon, Crete.

Nakos's last novel was written in Greek after she returned once more to her homeland. Ikarian Dreamers (1963) evidences much development when compared to the early works. The point of view has opened out; the characters have matured (now they are middle aged men and women); and this is Nakos's only novel with a male protagonist. The themes of personal isolation and social injustice are still prominent, but for the first time the novel ends with its main characters getting married, despite the disturbing threat of atomic war.

This final marriage is particularly significant, in contrast to the attitude toward marriage in earlier works, and in Nafsika, where it is seen as slavery for women, when it is possible at all. Earlier works (and again Nafsika), and even Boetian Earth, stress that a woman must be educated and have an independent means of self-support; in the last novel, this insistence is not heard. Perhaps the fact that Ikarian Dreamers has a male protagonist alters the vision in a basic way. The novel clearly shows how men condescend to women even if it does not explicitly comment on that fact. (pp. 163-65)

Nakos's disarming cavalier attitude is sometimes frustrating for an exacting reader. When The Deflowered One was published in Greece in 1932, the critic C. Dimaras wrote an effusively laudatory review. But first he enumerated the novella's weaknesses: "linguistic errors, awkwardness, countless typographical and even spelling errors; inaccuracies, chronological inconsistencies, unheard-of carelessness (the same characters change names suddenly in the middle of the body of the work), etc. Rarely have I seen a more untidy, a more uncombed, a more careless book." Finally, however, Dimaras calls the book, "An uncombed, spoiled child … but how spirited, how sweet, how lovable. The weaknesses I listed above would be enough to diminish or to kill the good impression of any other work: but here is another surprise: how strongly it draws us in and binds us, how it charms us."

Although the carelessness Dimaras describes is most evident in this first work, it is found, to some extent, in all Nakos's books. The author herself is not bothered by this fact; it seems trivial to her…. And so her works remain, rather like her home, even a bit like herself, at times unkempt, but always spirited and full of commitment and charm: the qualities that permitted her to portray with frankness young girls' private agonies coming of age in an often grim world, startling Greek literature into its own adolescence at the same time. (pp. 166-67)