As a stand-up comedian and limited-term employee of Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, Loveline, and Saturday Night Special (Roseanne's sketch-comedy show), Laura Kightlinger has established herself as a pleasant, solid, familiar comedic presence, not unlike a pre-politicized Ellen DeGeneres. Her first book, Quick Shots Of Rejection, is a semi-memoir that looks back on the author's life as an endless series of embarrassments and failures. But for the first half of Shots' 173 pages, Kightlinger's foibles don't seem particularly unusual or dramatic at all, instead running a familiar gamut from mildly embarrassing talent-show disasters to an incident in which she's fired from Ponderosa for cursing. About two-thirds of the way in, however, the book gets much darker and more rewarding, as the pains of adolescence and young adulthood give way to attempted sexual assault, freak deaths, and, perhaps worst of all, getting fired from the cast of a Tom Arnold sitcom. Through it all, Kightlinger retains a loose, anecdotal tone that in the book's earlier sections makes her material seem suspiciously like transcripts of a stand-up act. But Shots improves throughout, as Kightlinger's winning gallows humor and sensitive yet irreverent take on dark subject matter—including her grandmother and first love's untimely deaths—gives the book gravity and substance. The result is that Shots is more than just an amusing and pleasant literary debut from an unfailingly amusing and pleasant performer.