Woodswoman, by Anne LaBastille, is the first in a series of four memoirs that chronicle the local author and ecologist's foray into the unadulterated wilderness of the Adirondack Park.

In 1954, after divorcing her husband, Ms. LaBastille bought a twenty-acre plot of private land in the Adirondacks. With the help of local craftsman, she built a crude log cabin by hand on the shore of what her memoir terms "Black Bear Lake." Devoid of indoor plumbing and electricity, and accessible only by boat or hiking trail, the cabin became her new home. Woodswoman is the story of Anne LaBastille's life alone in the wilderness.

It's a compelling yarn- who hasn't dreamt of forsaking the hassles of modern society and adopting a completely hermetic lifestyle, with only stoic pines and lively wildlife for company? Unfortunately, Ms. LaBastille's ability to tell a good story is considerably less than her ability to build a log cabin; the construction of which, incidentally, is relayed in such grueling finite detail at the beginning of the book it makes you want to put it down before it even gets going.

If you stick it out you find that the rest of the memoir proceeds in a similarly tedious fashion. Parts of Ms. LaBastille's story are undeniably interesting, particularly to readers who are familiar with the landscape and local character she describes. She is apparently incapable of teasing out what is interesting from the irrelevant minutiae of everyday life. The incidents she details that would capture a reader's attention- violent winter storms, threatening trespassers, lost tourists, and rapacious wildlife- are buried within a rambling reconstruction of Anne LaBastille's every thought and move since she set foot in the Adirondack wilderness. To further complicate things, data about the Adirondack land and its history are interspersed at seemingly random intervals throughout the book; while one paragraph may read like an entry from a compulsively detailed journal, the next reads like a textbook.

Many reviewers have hailed Ms. LaBastille's bestselling memoir-trilogy (soon to be four, with the self-publication of Woodswoman IV) as the female response to Thoreau's famous wilderness chronicle, Walden. While you can't help but applaud the stamina and verve of a woman who lives alone in the wild, Anne LaBastille's similarity to Thoreau ends there. While Walden is a poignant, deftly crafted meditation on man's position in both the natural and the metaphysical universe, Woodswoman is primarily a meditation on the author herself, from what she ate for breakfast to the time of night she went to bed. If the point of memoir is to allow readers access to the author's unique human experience, Woodswoman certainly does its job. It does it so well in fact, you'll forget why you were interested in the first place.