The comments about card counting are interesting, but not all that relevant to the story, which is a pretty stock bildungsroman-lite of a sort that by design sa

The comments about card counting are interesting, but not all that relevant to the story, which is a pretty stock bildungsroman-lite of a sort that by design says very little about anything or anyone beyond its author. I really feel for people in that kind of situation. Say what you like about the wisdom or foolhardiness of deciding out of high school not to go to college and take on student debt, it did put me in the situation of having very quickly to work out whether and how I was going to be worth a damn - less flippantly, it put me in the position, at the beginning of my adult life, of deciding what I was going to do with my adult life, and how to go about accomplishing it. I can't imagine what it must be like to hit your mid-20s with tens of thousands, if not these days six figures, of undischargeable debt, and then have to start figuring out what sort of worth you're going to have in the world. It's a hell of a racket to run on teenagers, and, just as in the casino business against which this writer chose to try herself, it seems like the house always wins in the end.