We Do What We Must

I’ll admit: I braced for *We Do What We Must* to feel like a familiar tale of immigrant grit. Instead, Robbins handed me a moral grenade. The Giaconas aren’t just fleeing the mafia—they’re fleeing the idea that violence is the only currency that matters. And when New Orleans offers them the same bargain under a different flag (corrupt cops, political machines, the quiet threat of “protection”), the novel becomes a knife twist of irony. Robbins writes action with the precision of a noir—there’s a shootout in a sugar warehouse that had me gripping my headphones—but the real tension is in the quiet scenes: a father teaching his son to lie to the police, a wife calculating how much silence is worth. Little’s narration is *almost* perfect. His pacing is impeccable, letting the Sicilian dialect flavor the dialogue without drowning it, and his voice for the patriarch, Salvatore, carries the weight of a man who’s buried too much. My only gripe? The female voices occasionally blur together—his soprano for the Giacona women lacks the distinctiveness of his male characters. And while the sound design is clean, I wished for more atmospheric touches (street noises, dockside echoes) to ground the New Orleans sections. Still, the raw intimacy of the performance makes this feel less like a historical novel and more like eavesdropping on a family’s last honest conversation before the lies take over. If you love literary fiction that refuses easy redemption, this is your next obsession—just don’t expect to walk away unscathed.