I'm going to be honest and admit that I retained very little of this book for a variety of reasons, so full disclosure: anything I say might be unintentionally wrong.

I really liked the concepts for Age of Shadows: girl sets out on a mission to reverse time and kill the evil emperor before he's even born while the emperor struggles to end the evil inside of him before it consumes him. I liked the vibes and I liked the concepts, but I didn't really like the execution.
As I said, I didn't retain a lot because of some life circumstances and also I just didn't connect to the characters initially, so I didn't get invested in the story until about 85%. There were parts of the plot that confused me greatly, but that might have been an issue on my end. The plot (for me at least) didn't really pick up until the 80% mark, so I actually did enjoy the ending and the implications for book two (plus some really cool time travel tropes), but I was bored for a lot of the rest of it. I also felt that every time I picked up the book I had to remind myself of what was happening and I struggled with re-immersing myself.
I did like some of the character designs. Kal got on my nerves a bit, and I didn't like Zale either. Kyros's design was super cool to me because he reminded me a lot of my favorite characters but he was also a simp for no reason whatsoever. Jairus was neat (I don't know what I liked about him, though) and I didn't hate Maya either.
I think Age of Shadows is one of those books with great potential to find the right audience and to really take off, but personally, I couldn't get into it.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the free e-ARC!
2.5/5