I found Darin Strauss' More Than It Hurts You to be both very good and horrid, enough so that I half expected to see a curl appear right in the center of its title page. Overall, it's your standard Munchausen-by-proxy story, with some added racial elements.
A drawback, IMHO, is that the story didn't really interest me until I'd read close to 100 pages in. At my usual 50, I could have stopped, but since it was a hardback and I'm a bit on the miserly side, I gave it 50 more. I'm mostly glad I did.
A point of interest, at least to me, is that the reader knows pretty early on that the mother did it. The basic question in most of the fictionalized Munchausen stuff I've read/seen is: did she do it? (Interesting. I just wrote "she," thought about pronoun choice and realized I've never run into a story where a father suffers from Munchausen by proxy. Can men get it? Anyone know? When looking it up to check spelling, the examples of people having it were always women. But men get breast cancer. Stop the drift, Martha! Okay, back to the book.) Instead of did-she, the basic question in More Than It Hurts You is will-the-husband-find-out. Looking at the book that way, the end is both satisfying and annoying.
Race enters the story in that Darlene, head of pediatrics in the hospital where the baby is first taken, is African-American. Strauss presents compelling backgrounds for all his major character and is especially successful as conflict between the yuppie Jewish couple and the overachieving single black mother grows.
All the above is the story itself. Strauss did have some writing moments that reached out and grabbed me. Examples:
1) The book begins, "Fifteen minutes before happiness left him, Josh Golden …" (page 1) Wow! Dare you stop there. I sure couldn't.
2) In the first meeting the Goldens had with their lawyer, "he sat with calculated informality of the edge of his glass-topped desk." (page 204) And how many times has an individual who holds all the cards positioned himself somewhere "with calculated informality" in an attempt to put you at ease? Never? Then, for an example, watch the Law and Order episode where Lieutenant Van Buren interviews the light-skinned black man who has been passing for white. "So, my brother, you really did it. You passed."
3) "Rage, that devoted propagandist, airbrushes memory whenever it can." (page 300) I like the idea and the expression, but it has since dawned on me that it isn't just rage that can airbrush memory. Any emotion can. But Strauss does express the idea well.
4) Josh returns to his job in advertising after the DSS has taken his son, and, of course, everyone is sympathetic. But it's not working. "His grief had gone public. Sympathy is poison to salespeople. Salespeople needed to be Teflon." (page 303) Somehow the picture of Reagan and his "selling" of the country popped into mind. Who would ever feel sympathy for that shining city on a hill.
5) "Words, Darlene thought, are amazing little implements. Because of words something can be awful and untrue, while still being factual." (page 314) Maybe those sentences stood out because I read them shortly after watching Friday's debate.
So, summing up: Would I read another book by Strauss? Not sure. It'd probably depend on the subject. Do I recommend? I'll give it thumbs slightly up. It was interesting but it rarely grabbed me emotionally.
