North Florida’s literary map keeps expanding, and one of its newest and most distinctive voices belongs to Lusine Torossian, a YA fantasy author whose debut novel Light Weaver arrived from The Wild Rose Press in May 2025 carrying an already-earned honor: the 2023 SCBWI-Florida Rising Kite Award for Young Adult Fiction.
Lusine was born in Yerevan, Armenia, and moved to the United States at nine, settling eventually in North Florida with her husband and her writing partner, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Finny. She writes under her Armenian given name, Lusine Torossian, reclaiming a name that had belonged to her grandmother and that she carried through childhood before American schooling shifted her to her legal name, Loretta.
Light Weaver follows eighteen-year-old Satya, a relic thief who steals an ancient resurrection artifact from the Golden King, only to discover he is a puppet to a soul-harvesting sorcerer building an undead army from stolen souls, including her own family. The magic system at the heart of the book, where wielders of light and shadow trap souls inside silk tapestries, grew directly from Lusine’s own childhood memory: a massive tapestry on her grandmother’s bedroom wall, beside which her grandmother knelt in prayer. As a four-year-old, she believed that was where God resided.
The novel blends Armenian mythology with themes of generational trauma, the fears and survival instincts passed from parent to child across generations of hardship. Lusine researched the Armenian goddess Anahit, connected her to her counterparts in Greek and Persian traditions, and built her own reimagined mythology around the goddess of dawn, Ayg, whose scant presence in surviving texts led Lusine to reach across Greek, Roman, and Vedic goddess lore to assemble a coherent portrait.
Light Weaver is the first in a thematic series. Her work in progress, Sea Weaver, follows a vessel of the sea goddess in the same world, with new characters. Lusine has also hinted at a possible direct sequel to Light Weaver, responding to ARC readers who want to follow protagonist Satya and her love interest Rei further into the story.
A member of First Coast Romance Writers and the Florida writing community, Lusine Torossian is a North Florida author to follow closely. Light Weaver is available wherever books are sold.
Find Lusine Torossian
lusinetorossian.com
Light Weaver on Amazon
Instagram: @lusinetorossianauthor
TikTok: @lusinetorossian
Pinterest: lusinetorossian
YouTube: @LusineTorossianAuthor
Bluesky: @lusinetorossian.bsky.social
All links: linktr.ee/ltorossian
Sign Up for the Authors Newsletter: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/61kqtfmgj0
Watch the Entire Jolene’s Book and Writers Talk Podcast with Lusine Torossian
A Note from our Editor
We would encourage any North Florida Writers who would like to submit a Guest Post on our online magazine or be a featured author on the North Florida Writers Tour website then please get in touch using their CONTACT US form. Our other Online Magazine called “Webs and Blogs for Writers” does featured articles on authors not in our area CLICK HERE TO READ. For those who wish to be a guest on Jolene’s Book and Writer’s Talk podcast visit the Southern Dragon Publishing Information page.
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