A Name Earned (No Name, 3)

After overcoming years of trouble with his alcoholic father and surviving a near-death car accident, Bobby Byington―for the first time in his life―has a strong family. His parents are reunited, his father has turned away from the bottle, and Bobby is a starter on the high school basketball team.

But the door to trouble never stays closed. Bobby's girlfriend, Faye, is suffering attacks from a school bully, and some of Bobby's basketball teammates are dealing with all-too-familiar problems at home.

Hoping to help his friends, Bobby shares the legend of No Name, a story about a young man's heated relationship with his father. Coach Robison told it to him back when Bobby needed to hide from his own dad. As the playoffs near and the team plays to win, Coach delivers another message that extends well beyond the basketball court: "Your life is carved by the choices you make. You earn your name by your actions."

Tim Tingle is an Oklahoma Choctaw and an award-winning author and storyteller. Tim performs a Choctaw story before Chief Batton's State of the Nation address at every Choctaw Nation Labor Day Festival. In June 2011, Tim spoke at the Library of Congress and performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. From 2011 to 2016 he was featured at Choctaw Days, a celebration at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.

Tim's great-great-grandfather, John Carnes, walked the Trail of Tears in 1835. In 1992, Tim retraced the trail to Choctaw homelands in Mississippi, a journey that inspired his first book, Walking the Choctaw Road. Tim's first Pathfinders novel, Danny Blackgoat: Navajo Prisoner, was an American Indian Youth Literature Awards honor book in 2014. In 2018, Tim received the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book. That same year, A Name Earned, the third book in his No Name series for young readers, earned a Kirkus starred review.