Only Begotten Daughter

Only Begotten Daughter is a satire about the second coming, except that the Messiah is a girl from New Jersey. Murray Jacob Katz is a celibate Jewish recluse living in an abandoned lighthouse in Atlantic City who donates to a sperm bank. One of his samples starts to grow on its own, and Murray steals the female embryo shortly before the clinic is bombed. His daughter, Julie Katz, turns out to be the daughter of God and the half sister of Jesus. She can breathe underwater and bring dead animals back to life, and she talks to a sponge named Amanda.

Julie's powers do not make her life easier. She raises the sea to stop an army of arsonists and founds a church without meaning to. The devil tempts her, and she goes down into hell, where she meets her half brother Jesus. She returns stripped of her powers to a New Jersey ruled by a fundamentalist preacher, Billy Milk, who has his own ideas about what a second coming should look like. Julie is crucified, survives, defeats the devil, and learns at last that God, her mother, may be a sea sponge.

Morrow writes comedy with a serious purpose: the book is a long argument about why people suffer and what they can do about it, conducted through jokes, miracles and some genuinely painful scenes. Publishers Weekly called it "highly imaginative, funny and irreverent." Kirkus, less taken, granted that it is "clever and erudite" but found it "dense, depressing, and unamusing withal." Both are fair descriptions of different pages. Devout readers may find it offensive, and it means to provoke. Readers who like Kurt Vonnegut, Monty Python or theology argued with a straight face will get the most from it.