Big Cats, the exquisitely written first collection of short stories from Holiday Reinhorn, cultivates an exceptionally funny and hard-earned optimism. There is a cast of wry and vivid characters, who even in the throes of adolescent confusion or adult paralysis ultimately know the score; they may not always recognize what to do with wisdom or love or forgiveness, but little victories seem not that far off on the horizon.

In “Get Away from Me David,”we are introduced to a California loan officer in a familiar fluorescent-lit professional hell. Getting through mundane activities on autopilot, David fantasizes about a security guard with hangnails and a “Goddess on Board” bumper sticker and actively hates his boss, Jose Martinson, who is “actually two people—one is Jose, the other his corporate enthusiasm, which is so lifelike it’s like a twin brother walking along side him.”

Haunted by a dead wife and absent child, David teeters on a precipice of sobriety that hinges on not taking that fatal sip from the stash of Vicks Dayquil in his desk drawer as an earthquake hits and forces his hand. David’s story is heartbreaking, yet you can’t help but hope that anyone possessing such insight and humor will eventually be okay—or at least escape a life of anxiously toxic corporate wellbeing, and if not that, then at least finally get to see “what it would be like to go over one night in a ninja costume to Jose’s cul-de-sac, abduct his golden retrievers, and drag them away in a gunnysack.”

In the wildly funny title story, two fourteen-year-old zoo employees approach the threshold of understanding the differences that will most likely end their friendship as they grow and mature. When Brenda’s depressed and dowdy mother cajoles Brenda to expand her horizons beyond her friend Polly, Brenda wants to respond, “Polly is my horizon.” Polly is her dangerous, strangely attractive “blood sister” whose sexual bravado excites her. (“Her words are invisible but they crash between my legs like cymbals.”) Love and loathing are bubbling so near the surface; Brenda wants to “hate kiss” her foe over and over. But this particular idolization ends with Brenda feeling lighter than air, symbolically beyond Polly as she witnesses the true grace of one of the zookeepers.

Reinhorn paints a bleak landscape for her characters, but like the woman in another story “The White Dog”who desperately hires a psychic in order to communicate with her ailing dog, only to hear her old furry companion chide, “don’t make this about you,” the reader is reminded of the small moments of grace and humor afforded by humility. As loan officer David ends his story by tearing off the wrapper on his DayQuil, Reinhorn writes “the world is murmuring alternatives, of course, but he’s only savoring the fall.” The stronger stories in this collection persuade us, with humor and wry tenderness, to also savor the fallen and by extension, our own ridiculous selves.