All I Need to Know I Learned from the Golden Girls by T Ann Pryor

 All I Need to Know I Learned from the Golden Girls is the author’s love letter to the show, if you will, of her life experiences and what she took from them based on how the Golden Girls had dealt with it. She incorporates the scenes with her events and examines life from their view. Each Golden Girl is studied and their positive and negative escapades compared to how we can all deal with life.

I went into this book with a very open mind as I was a big fan of the Golden Girls way back when and I wondered about the “all I need to know” part, considering some of Blanche’s exploits. What makes me laugh now when I look back at the show is just how times have changed in the way people look. Everyone besides Sofia was meant to be in their fifties and yet if you look at a lot of fifty-year-olds now, there is a huge difference!

The book is very short, which makes it a quick read. I liked the quotes that started the chapters off and many of the stories brought the characters’ voices back to me so I could hear it like a movie.

The story is written from a very chatty perspective and is not a tale from outside looking in at the author, but more like a sharing from the inside out. She holds nothing back when she wants to admit something and even if it’s a little more out there, it’s not sugar-coated. It could have used a good edit though as there are punctuation errors like missing quotation marks, lines are repeated, and the flow of the info sometimes doesn’t work. By this I mean she will be in the middle of a story and the next thing she goes back to something she was speaking about ages ago. It becomes rather confusing.

As a quick read I enjoyed its humour but I didn’t feel it was quite what its title said. The author did not really say they were prepared for a situation because of a lesson learnt from the show. It was more of a “Oh and something similar happened when...” A fun book, but not one I would read again.

Thanks to Reedsy Discovery and the author for the opportunity to review the book.

The author has since assured me that the incorrect version was uploaded and that all editing and formatting issues were sorted out.