The Stone Lions is an excellent young adult novel set in Spain in the early1400's. Original Awesome Indies' Assessment (5 stars): Time is rapidly running out for Ara to expose him for the evil man that he is.ĪIBA Book of the Day: 3 December, 2021: 037/41712Īwesome Indies Book Awards is pleased to include THE STONE LIONS by GWEN DANDRIDGE in the library of Awesome Indies' Seal of Excellence recipients. They, along with her cousin, then must work together to see that the wazir's plans are thwarted.

Only when she is summoned to learn from the math magician herself is she able to confide in someone whom she can trust. Over the following weeks, she makes several more observations. As she hides in order to keep from being caught where she doesn't belong, she witnesses the Wazir, her father's most trusted adviser, do some magic which just doesn't appear to be right. As the story opens, Ara has again gone where she doesn't belong because she wants to see the math magician who is arriving for a visit. Ara, a young Muslim girl and daughter of the sultan, is always acting in ways that are just not appropriate for a girl. What an engaging way to teach kids about symmetry, specifically (using easy to understand terms), flips, turns, slides, and glides. The headers do not match the symmetry types.This was quite an enjoyable book filled with magic, tension, and math. The illustrations from The Stone Lions are under here in color. I tried to stay true to the original plans as I wrote. The other interesting piece of information I discovered during my research was what the palaces looked like (and the original lion fountain) in the late 1300's. Antonio Orihuela Uzal's book, Casas y palacios nazaríes, describes the Alhambra during the late 1300’s. It took two of us to turn each pages while one, standing on a chair, photographed each page.

It was so large and fragile that it couldn't be removed from the library. At the time, the only way I could get access to it was through the courtesy of the SBCC Library, who borrowed it for me. One of the things I tried to do in The Stone Lions, is use illustrations (sometimes tweaked to get a specific symmetry) from Owen Jones' book: Plans, elevations, sections, and details of the Alhambra published in the mid-1800's. It is true that most all the walls, the ceilings and the floors are covered with symmetry.

When I created The Stone Lions, I actually went to the Alhambra.

The Stone Lions by Gwen Dandridge