Charles Mashburn’s coming-of-age novel, Just a Boy, tells the story of a boy growing up in mid-twentieth-century Buckeye, Arizona, a time and a place that allowed children to roam without care. At the same time, many children’s homes, where they should have felt the safest, could be the most frightening places in the world. In spite of, maybe even because of all they encountered, they survived, and in the end, even thrived. By focusing on the good stuff and letting the bad stuff slide away, Just a Boy is not about forgetting the bad, but about looking back on it as a lesson that helped to shape a generation of boys into who they are.