Everything separates Elias and Justine. Or rather, nothing unites them. In appearance, at least.

On one side: Lebanese of origin, homosexual in the closet, the first is 25 years old and has his life ahead of him. A Montrealer in her mid-thirties, Justine has just been set up by the man of her life, or rather the perfect future father of her children. And yet, a unique place unites them, an inexplicable chemistry that is little exploited in literature, I call it: guy-girl friendship. So much so that this Justine will go so far as to suggest to her Elias that they start a family with her, unusual, certainly, in a very contemporary hut.

Samuel Larochelle, prolific author and journalist, comes to us with this fairly new, although very modern, story. Without doubt the most accomplished of his career, and the most ambitious, by his own admission. Definitely woke, some will say. The novel has already been talked about, in spite of itself and for the wrong reasons, its cover, we remember, having visibly and without the knowledge of its author been generated by artificial intelligence (a character seems to have three legs).

If the author passes a little quickly on this little-known love at first sight which we struggle to believe at first, and if certain dialogues sound a little flat (or too well thought out), Samuel Larochelle has the merit of immersing us here and with both feet in a fascinating universe, burning with current events (daring at times), which we imagine very well transposed, who knows, one day on a screen.