A Devotional Handbook for Beginning College Students
Pete Charton, Ph.D.
Self-Published, 2012, 126 pp., $8.95

Off to College with King Solomon offers spiritual and secular advice for Christian college students from Freshman Week through graduation. Charton incorporates examples from sports and history to make spiritual points but always brings it home to verses in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. His calm, direct writing style is sure to appeal to many Christian college students.
—Jasmine Evans is a former Sunday School teacher and educator who now works as a freelance writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more here.

Although the content of this material is good for students entering college, I feel, regrettably so, this material would be more user friendly for college students if the graphics inside were flashier. Contrasted with the graphics of Real Conversations for example, the layout and graphics are more appealing to a young audience in the case of Real Conversations. Our culture is driven by these concerns.
—Rick Herd

The concept behind this book is excellent. Inbound college students are in for some of the greatest life changes they’ll ever face, and they need a sound resource—a spiritual compass—to help them navigate those changes successfully. Dr. Charton utilizes his more than three decades as a college professor to deliver those resources, framed around King Solomon’s proverbs. Skillfully, he takes a proverb (or snippet) and expands on its theme, integrating it into the life of a college freshman. The structure of the handbook is, in fact, thematic, based on units rather than chapters.
For instance:
Unit One: Maxing-Out Welcome Week covers what the student needs to be aware of, as well as beware of.
Unit Three: Time(ly) Management provides very practical steps the student will do well to engage, some being proactive while others are more cautionary (such as getting enough rest).
Unit Six: Money Magic lays out useful—if not imperative—guidance for the student’s life with money, even touching on credit cards. As Charton makes clear, there are probable, far-reaching, “money consequences” that begin in college.
Unit Nine: Relationship Roulette doesn’t sugar coat what’s at stake for the students in terms of the relationships they’ll be exposed to, good and bad.

Of the 10 units, perhaps the most important is Unit Four: Major Considerations. Drilling down into the bedrock of what a student’s college career will provide him or her—and require—is essential. Charton’s pairing of “Career Myths” and “Career Reality” peels back the curtain, allowing students to peer into what future they may want, even as “Think in New Ways” challenges them to struggle with what future best fits their interests, skills and talents.

While it is not necessarily detrimental to the book’s content, it is unfortunate that Off to College with King Solomon is self-published at the most elemental level. No publisher is referenced, either on the back cover or within the front matter. The cover design is extremely simple; the only image used in this book is one of autumn leaves. An image of a college campus, stock or illustrated, would have been more suitable. There isn’t any print on the book’s spine, so once the book is shelved, the only way to discern what it is would be by pulling it out again. The interior of the book reminded me of a very long term paper. The unit headings are formatted exactly as the lessons. Off to College with King Solomon is available from Amazon for $8.95 for the paperback and $7.95 for the Kindle edition.
—Joel Lund is the award-winning author of The Ultimate Survival Guide for Youth Ministers and Watson’s Way: Life Lessons We Earned from Our Brilliant Dog (both available at his website, as well as at Amazon and other booksellers). Joel is a former youth pastor, as well as a managing principal for a national investment firm, where he led a team of more than 40 financial professionals, overseeing more than $400M. He’s now a business coach, mentor to those in ministry and a full-time writer.

###