Bitter milk

The son of an unknown father and an ostracized mother, and the next of kin in a long line of bastard relatives, nine-year-old Loren Garland lives a life of subtle mystery beneath the shadow of an East Tennessee mountain. It is on his family's broken-down estate that Loren's imagination grows, and with it, the extraordinary voice of "Bitter Milk," a young boy named Luther who may be Loren's imaginary friend, his conscience, or his evil twin. And yet outside the puzzle of Loren's brain, there are the darker goings-on of his family his mother who wishes she were a man, his new uncle who plans to…