I picked this up from NetGalley.com because I love verse novels and historical fiction. I've done graduate work with nontraditional text structures in childrens' and YA literature, so I gravitated right to it. 
 May B. is charming and a fast read. Rose's inspiration in the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder is clear. I couldn't help but feel that this was Wilder's The Long Winter with a more contemporary focus. 
 May B. is a twelve-year-old girl (although I had a hard time seeing her that young in my mind) sent to live with another frontier family in Kansas. Isolated from her family, and suddenly left alone by circumstances beyond her control, she is forced to survive on her own. Running throughout the story are interludes in which she recalls her painful struggles with schooling (after which she feels she's been branded a failure), most specifically reading. While she fights the demons of her own isolation and the elements, she is also tormented emotionally by these memories and returns periodically to her reader in an attempt to conquer her fears of reading. 
 I've read many verse novels, and only a few have truly gotten the idea behind it. Too often verse merely simplifies the story instead of enhancing it. However, Rose succeeds in her use of the emotional edge of verse to pull us into the heroine's mental state as her crisis progresses in the story. 
 While I felt the element regarding her reading disability (dyslexia) was a unique angle, I didn't feel it was critical to the structure of the story. Yes, it adds a layer of complexity to her feelings of failure and strengthens her resolve, but I could have read her story just as powerfully without it. There were points where I felt that perhaps the dyslexia angle was added because it was trendy. 
 For me, the power in this book comes from the ending, in her final crucial decisions when time is running out. While the ancillary/peripheral discussions of her dyslexia didn't weaken the narrative, I didn't feel they noticeably bolstered it, either. As a story of survival and triumph in the face of insurmountable odds, it's superb. Young readers will find the format refreshing and accessible.