Syreeta McFadden: First, let me start off with a few caveats.

Syreeta McFadden is a Brooklyn-based writer, photographer, and adjunct professor of English. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, BuzzFeed, NPR, The Nation and Storyscape Journal. She is the managing editor of the online literary magazine Union Station and a co-curator of the group Poets in Unexpected Places. She is currently working on collections of short stories and essays. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “Angela Flournoy is a friend.”

I don’t do Christmas. The universe is a hilarious minx. “Sunday Candy” is my jam of the week. I’ve seen every episode of NCIS that has ever aired. I’m particularly fond of seasons six and seven.

This is all to say that I could not tell you why I’d even agree to be a judge for this competition that will inevitably lead to some kind of dragging from book lovers. But I should also tell you that when I received my books, Richard Price’s The Whites and Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night, it was the Chrismakwazukkah (yes, this is a real holiday and it’s mine) present I didn’t even know I wanted. I knew that what would follow would be an impossible decision, but it was so right.

Guys, I’m from Wisconsin. Old people and crime procedurals are kind of our thing, I guess. I don’t need to watch Making a Murderer, I feel like I’m good. I used to volunteer at nursing homes in my hometown of Milwaukee, and we all watched Cocoon together while eating gingersnaps.

That said, I never saw the movie version of Clockers or read any Richard Price book before in my life. I was suspicious of the insistence of the pen name he uses for The Whites—it’s a bit meta. If it’s a Richard Price book, why continue the charade of writing as Harry Brandt? Even Sasha Fierce got dropped after one album to fully embrace the Amazonian cyborg feminist identity known as Beyoncé. Eventually I set the shade aside and soldiered through this book. Price-as-Brandt gives us that old-school hardboiled crime novel protagonist: Night watch manager Billy Graves is shocked out his humdrum state of maudlin suburban living ennui when an old and very cold case surfaces through the death of Jeffery Bannion. Billy used to run with a squad of cops known as the Wild Geese who ran the streets of the Bronx, and “in the eyes of the people they protected and occasionally avenged, walked the streets like gods.” The Wild Geese had long believed Bannion guilty of murder, but the wheels of justice seemed to turn in his favor. And like all squads over time, things fell apart: Billy accidentally killed a 10-year-old boy during a pursuit of another dirtbag, and his career has never been the same.

Here’s the thing though: Price-as-Brandt is situating this story in a very specific social environment right now, so there’s a kind of cognitive dissonance in looking behind the “blue wall of silence” and following a once-promising cop whose career was unraveled by poor personal decisions and an unchecked abuse of power. There were moments when I grew pretty impatient with Billy, and perhaps the book. I’m supposed to feel uncomfortable about that (and I do) because police work is gray and murky, the rule of law is fleeting in the eye of the beholder, good is a child’s fantasy. The Whites is a Crimey McCrime novel that I totally dig, with really compelling descriptions of the New York I pretend not to see except in Law & Order marathons or the occasional episode of Blue Bloods that catches my eye. But it’s also a bit of ghost story, asking us to assess the meaning of vengeance. Satisfaction in reading a crime novel comes when you feel like you can solve the puzzle and right the wrong, as Billy Graves does here. But at what cost? I worry about Billy, his wife Carmen and her undiagnosed PTSD, his dad, and his ex-Wild Geese homie Yasmeen, the Angelica Schuyler of this novel. My heart breaks a little for Pavlicek, Billy’s former police partner. Billy’s life is messy and the suspense is in how he reaches equilibrium without self-destructing.

Price-as-Brandt rushes into Sorkin-esque noir dialogue that occasionally mutes the drama for me. He doesn’t slow scenes down very much, because he relies on the voices of the characters for storytelling. It is clear that his ear for dialogue is inimitable. But when we do get a break from the characters’ snappy, shade-driven conversations, it’s in moments of breathless suspense following the trail of Milton Ramos, the bloodthirsty man seeking revenge against a member of the Graves family. This is where Price-as-Brandt shines:

To avenge his family, he would be destroying what was left of it. The Ramos family would go from two here to two gone, which is to say no one left. But what if instead of Ramos obliteration they—he—went the other way and doubled their number? … He was still standing outside his car, bat in hand, when Carmen’s brother suddenly came out of the motel, trotted to the Range Rover, and opened the passenger door. Victor grabbed a mini-recorder from the glove box, then dropped his car keys and accidentally kicked them into the night. Using the light on his cell phone, he sank into a hunch and began duck-walking all over the lot in an effort to find them, Milton watching as Victor unwittingly came in his direction, his bowed head like an offering.

In contrast, I was prepared to be bored reading Kent Haruf. Years ago, a guy I had a crush on loved the hell out of his novel Plainsong. When he told me the plot, I tried to care but found that it bored the socks off my eyes. I know that’s not a real thing, but for serious, I might have fallen asleep while he explained it to me.

And yet, Haruf had me at beat drop when not-so-very-young (like legit elderly) Addie Moore, widowed and living alone, just came out with her “indecent proposal” to her neighbor and acquaintance, widower Louis Waters, and asked him if he’d agree to sleep with her nightly. I know, right?! Naturally, I was like…whaa???? Let’s. Go. The scandalous proposal only exposes our very ageist views about the courtship and sex lives of seniors. The slow burn of Addie and Louis’s relationship is life-affirming. Love and companionship may die when we lose our significant others but it can be found again, if we’re brave and bold enough to ask for it.

Our Souls at Night is spare and taut, yet reading it feels expansive and familiar. The characters eat iceberg lettuce with Thousand Island dressing. They drink root beer floats. I realized that I’d been robbed by letting a not-so-interesting man describe Haruf’s work to me—I was immediately taken in by this love after love, all the simplest pleasures that the poet Jack Gilbert tells us that we should indulge. I never imagined that I would feel so awake following Addie and Louis’s nightly confessions of the failures and triumphs of their lives. Haruf makes their conversation feel so urgent, vital, necessary, and present. They have very little to hide from each other and the tension is on the town, their adult children, and trying to process how two single elderly adults could dare to be so unapologetically casual about their relationship. They have nothing to hide from each other about who they were before and what they learned; the way they’re so honest with sharing their own stories is just so edifying. They actually make dating fun.

In some ways, Price-as-Brandt’s mundane descriptions share this style with Haruf, if you can believe it. Haruf uses a poet’s economy to make the small world of their town of Holt, Colo., palpable—the absence of excessive detail to identify place allows for such fluidity in the dialogue that you feel the characters are sitting next to you. It makes their voices so very clear. As they lay side by side talking before settling into a sleep, you hear the warmth and softness in Addie’s voice, and Louis’s small gestures become enormous, befitting a moment in a Philip Levine poem:

They lay next to each other and listened to the rain. So life hasn’t turned out right for either of us, not the way we expected, he said. Except it feels good now, at this moment. Better than I have reason to believe I deserve, he said. … In Addie’s bedroom Louis put his hand out the window and caught the rain dripping off the eaves and came to bed and touched his wet hand on Addie’s soft cheek.

How could one make such an impossible choice given these two wildly divergent fictional universes, guys? I’m looking forward to seeing the film adaption of The Whites but for now, I choose the December-December romance in the heart of America for reminding us to risk happiness at any age, no matter what anyone thinks.