Review of Code Name Nanette by M.E. Dawson
I don’t understand authors who have zero online presence! I have searched Google, Amazon, Goodreads, and Smashwords and can’t find anything at all about this person! I don’t have time to start trawling my emails for the original email from them, so, sorry folks, there is no author bio!
Anyway, onto the review! Code Name Nanette is a marvelous story, which had me hooked from beginning to end. Reading it kind of became a guilty pleasure, and I actively started seeking out kindle time, just so that I could finish it. The story opens in a contemporary setting, in which a young man called Joe Parker, desperate to find out the truth about his grandfather’s identity, has tracked down a former British Spy, Nanette, an octogenarian, currently residing in a nursing home. Nanette, in spite of her advanced years, is still a bit of a saucy minx and she soon has Joe wrapped completely around her little finger, as she tells the story of his grandmother, a.k.a Regina, or The Queen - who served alongside her behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied France.
The story-telling in this book is amazing and I definitely felt that I had been transported back to 1940′s France. The characterization is also flawless, with Joe, Nanette, and Regina as well as one or two other key players all being fully rounded. If Joe was expecting to hear how his grandparents met during the war, then he was in for a shock – because we get a full blown account of Regina’s lesbian affair with a local doctor. Far from being tasteless or tacky, this aspect really tugged at my heart-strings. Likewise Nanette’s own lurid accounts of how she went undercover as a prostitute, servicing horny German soldiers for secrets had me riveted. Oddly enough, I’ve never thought of prostitutes as spies before, and this definitely added a whole new dimension to the story. Joe’s own love-life is also a little complex, with his current girlfriend seemingly more interested in his ex-girlfriend than she is in him, but this is all by the by, as it is Nanette and Regina that drive and dominate the story.
With this all said, I was RIPPING MY HAIR OUT IN FRUSTRATION at the book’s ending, because it spectacularly failed to answer the one burning question that it had been asking throughout – namely who was Joe’s grandfather. Either the author felt that this small detail was too insignificant to share or they got sidetracked, or I Dunno, kidnapped by aliens, but this totally ruined what had been an amazing reading experience for me.
Code Name Nanette is available to download from Amazon, and if the author wishes to provide me with a brief bio, I will add it to this post.
