Unlike most entries in this series, The Silver Bullets of Annie Oakley isn't a retelling of a fairy tale. Instead, it's more like casting the biography of a real person in a new light as if she was a part of this fantastical world. Phoebe Ann Moses was born in Ohio in 1860 to a poor family and was hired out to help run a house in a neighboring county at a young age. She gets away from the abusive couple and returns to her family and starts hunting to help put food on the table. Eventually she becomes a renowned sharpshooter and joins Buffalo Bill's Wild West show and tours Europe. Where Lackey adapts Annie Oakley's story is that the abusive couple was a pair of werewolves and while touring Germany, the young woman learns that she has the potential to use air magic and become an Air Master, with the help and training of another sharpshooting Air Master who has sought Annie out to teach her how to control her powers. During her training, Annie and her husband help the local Bruderschaft von Jaegermeistern to track down some elementals that are causing problems and learn more about the magical world in general.
The story itself isn't bad at all, but followers of this series won't find anything new in it. Where the previous book, Jolene, seemed like it was going to start exploring America, this one took the series back to Europe. Where others' discovery and development of their magic were interesting and unique adventures, this one felt very formulaic and it never really felt like much of a journey. Even the ultimate conflict at the end of the book felt anti-climatic and inevitable. While it wasn't quite as half hearted as, say, Steadfast's conclusion, it still didn't feel like it had any real impact on the overall story, just the eventual ending to events that were set up at the start. Nothing surprising, nothing seriously at risk. Even the hopeful cure that could have come from the conflict felt like it was put in just to give Annie a bit more drive to confront the character since the consequences of never getting the cure were discussed and, essentially, dismissed by those that mattered.
What's worse is that there appears to be a pretty substantial continuity error for anyone who has taken the time to follow the series. The character that comes in to train Annie sounds a lot like a central character to one of the previous books in the series. Elemental Masters is not beyond bringing in established characters to add connections to the rest of the series. This is great for an anthology series with a lot of one-off stories like this, as it allows for even these mostly unconnected stories to feel like a part of the whole. This also lets you see how some characters that were the protagonist in their own books have grown or changed since we last saw them. Here, the character teaching Annie seems to be Giselle from the Rapunzel retelling, From a High Tower, but she calls herself Frida. The story of how she uses her air magic to perform trick shots, as well as how she also joined a Wild West show all sound like Giselle's story, but details about Frida's childhood and family don't line up with Giselle's history. So either Frida is a thinly-veiled recasting of Giselle, or Lackey made some mistakes, and it's hard to tell which it is. Either way, it isn't good for fans that have actually been following this series.
Like I said before, The Silver Bullets of Annie Oakley: Elemental Masters, Book 16 as a standalone novel isn't bad. It is an interesting read, but the problem comes in if you are a fan of the series. When most of the books in a series like this are origin stories, it feels like there is no real character development and growth. I enjoy this series the most when characters return and every time Lackey decides to follow Nan and Sarah, we get to see those characters go from support to primary and then develop their own unique gifts. We also saw other secondary characters grow and it felt like the series was finally getting some traction. When Jolene came out and the entire focus switched to the other side of the world, I felt like maybe Lackey was deciding to start something new. When I heard about one focused on Annie Oakley, I had hopes that we would get more American-based Elemental Masters tales that would build on what Jolene started, but with the exception of the first chapter, this book takes place back in Europe and with only ancillary connections to the rest of the series. There is the chance that the next book (whatever it might be) will be a continuation of Annie's story (either as a primary character or a secondary one), and that it will actually build on what came before, but Elemental Masters needs to have a bit more focus if it is actually going to reward longtime readers of this series.
