The Shape of What Remains

by Lisa C. Taylor

What did six-year-old Serena Calvano see that caused her to run in the road on a clear November morning while waiting for the school bus with her mother? Teresa Calvano has spent a decade blaming herself for Serena's violent death and wishing it was her husband, Luke who was with Serena that day so the guilt didn't fall so heavily on her shoulders. When her husband and friends lose patience with her failure to get back to life, Teresa turns to books, therapy, and Janis Joplin to address her continued unraveling. Is there a cure for grief? In Teresa's world, her research and life as a successful professor fail to offer the one thing she most wants: another day with her six-year-old daughter.

Genres: Fiction

300 pages, Paperback

First published February 18, 2025

About the author

Lisa C. Taylor is the author of a novel, The Shape of What Remains, was released on February 18, 2025. This novel tackles one woman's journey back to life after the unexpected death of her child. The novel is listed on Kindle for $0.99 and available now. She is also the author of a collection of poetry, Interrogation of Morning (2022), two short story collections, Impossibly Small Spaces (2018) and Growing a New Tail (2015) and two other collections of poetry, including Necessary Silence (2013, Arlen House/Syracuse University Press). Both her poetry and fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She's been a finalist in many contests and recently won the Hugo House New Works Award for short fiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies including Tahoma Literary Review, Lily Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Naugatuck River Review, MER VOX, Live Encounters, Hawai'i Pacific Review, Women's Art Quarterly Journal, Crack the Spine Anthology, Worcester Review, Crannog, and Sky Island Journal. She was a January 2015 spotlight feature for the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) and was a mentor in their writer-to-writer program. Lisa holds an MFA in Creative Writing as well as an MA. She teaches creative writing online and offers private workshops and mentoring. She is the co-director of the Mesa Verde Writers Conference and Literary Festival.

Reviews

[Teresa]

Find my review at MER:
https://merliterary.com/2025/04/20/th...

[Orliss · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Shape of What Remains is a compelling and ultimately uplifting story about one woman's journey to get her life back ten years after the violent and untimely death of her young daughter. Not only is Teresa a character you want to route for; her struggle feels authentic. This author clearly knows something about long grief. The therapeutic process seems spot on, as do her relationship challenges with her often absent husband, Luke. This book will make you laugh, cry, cheer, and maybe curse at points. It is a very human story.

[Stef · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one deals with some pretty heavy topics, but it isn’t overly sad. I liked the main character and her development throughout the novel.

[Lin F · Rating 5 out of 5]

In reality, probably a 4 star book. But when someone tackles the tough topic of child loss and gets so many things right about grief, that’s an extra star in my book, always.

[Christen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most heartfelt book I’ve read so far this year. The Shape of What Remains tells the story of a woman who is rebuilding her life after being consumed for years with the grief of losing a child. I received this book as an ARC and didn’t crack it for a couple months (apologies) because it sounded heavy, and I wasn’t sure I could handle it emotionally. It turned out to be exactly the book I needed, full of healing and hope. It’s character driven and the characters feel so incredibly real and human. Highly recommend this one.

[Lindsey Sanford · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

This was such a tragically healing story. While there was a lot I couldn't relate to (save for being a plant killer) Taylor did a great job at describing the pain and mourning that Tessa has gone through, and is still going through, over the loss of her daughter. As a reader, I could feel the heaviness of her guilt, and it made me want to hold her hand over a cup of tea as she unloaded all of her feelings.

Which is sort of how the book read. The pacing and flow was more on the telling side, and read like a stream of conscience journal entry, which took me a little bit of getting use to. But once I did, the story moved along pretty well.

I was impressed and inspired by the change Tessa went through over the course of the book, and how she started to rediscover herself as a woman, a mother, and a scholar.

I was not fond of her husband, Luke. He sucked.

This book touched a lot on grief, and how there's no time frame for when or how long you feel that loss. It's just about putting one foot in front of the other when you're ready, and learning to navigate through this newly formed hole in your life.

While this book wasn't my normal cup of tea, and while I did struggle with connecting to Teresa and what she was going through specifically, I did enjoy it for the most part. Though sometimes--especially toward the end--I found myself skimming because I was pretty over Luke and his shenanigans.

The author created imperfect, flawed, but very human people--especially in Tess--and I couldn't help but admire her strength and resilience over the course of this book.

I was sent a copy of this book by the publisher. All thoughts and opinions are my own

[DelSheree · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a novel that dealt with a lot of difficult emotions and complex decisions. It's characters were layered and not easily unpacked by the reader. I enjoyed that this wasn't a simple story. Grief is never simple, but it wasn't a clear cut path that the reader could expect and see coming from the early chapters. Although I appreciated the complexity of the story and characters, what kept me from giving it 5 stars was that it took what felt like a very long time for the characters/storyline to reach a point of hope. This made it hard for me to want to reengage with the story when I took a break from the heaviness. I also had a hard time understanding and connecting with the main character's ultimate decisions and the path she chose in the end, but this did not affect my review rating, because I appreciate when characters aren't easy to figure out and do things that I would not do myself. It feels more human and realistic, even if I can't personally relate to what a character chooses.

[JEFFREY M. KAGAN, MD · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expressing Emotion

THE SHAPE OF WHAT REMAINS by Lisa C. Taylor is a story that could happen to most any family. A 6-year-old daughter runs into the street to retrieve an object and tragically dies. Lisa C. Taylor captures how this horrific sentinel event paralyzes the further social evolvement of her immediate family, especially her mom, Teresa, for over 10 years. The story takes place in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Great Britain, and the reader feels like they are visiting those places. In addition, many emotions of both Teresa and her husband Luke, both academics teaching college, are made to feel palpable as they attempt to recover from the loss of a child and salvage their marriage. The attention to detail is maintained throughout the book. I typically spend several weeks to months reading a novel, but I found this one difficult to put down.
Jeffrey M. Kagan, MD

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is grief, how long does it last, and how do we cope with it? When is it healthy and when is it destructive? Does it ever end or do we learn to live with it as it becomes part of us forever? In Lisa Taylor’s The Shape of What Remains, these questions are opened and probed as we watch Teresa struggle for more than 10 years after the death of her young child, Serena, at the age of six. Distracted for a moment, Theresa doesn’t see her beloved daughter run out into the street, killed instantly by a truck. Tessa’s new relationships with loved ones, to her career and of her sense of self and to her place in the world are challenged.

Although we all deal with grief in our own way, this novel opens questions about what is grieving. The possible answers probed in Taylor’s novel might surprise you.

[Hope Noar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can we learn to accept grief?

Losing a child is one of the hardest things one can ever experience. A child is a part of us. She reminds us of ourselves when we were little. We get to experience our childhood all over again through her eyes. Losing a child is losing a part of ourselves. We can try to move on, but everything we see and do reminds us of our child. We know in our hearts that our child would want us to find joy, but doing so is challenging.
The experience of losing someone you made is so profound. I was brought into this story and felt as if I was experiencing this myself. Grief never goes away. We just need to find ways of living with it.
This book was excellent and very thought provoking. I highly recommend it.

[TJ Patton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was given a galley of this book to review.

What happens to Teresa, a professor of literature, wife, and mother of two, is every parent's worst nightmare. The story begins ten years after the death of her young daughter. She's still deep in grief, her marriage is an empty shell, and she's barely clinging to her career when things start to turn around.
I'd say more, but I don't want to give anything away.
The message in this book is a powerful one--grief is personal, it plays by it's own rules and follows it's own timeline. Healing does not follow a straight path.

The conclusion is satisfying without being sappy.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The loss of a child is a parent’s worst nightmare, and ten years after the hit-and-run death of six-year-old Serena, her mother has not moved on. Teresa is frozen in grief, her marriage a sham, and her work-life moribund. In The Shape of What Remains, Lisa C. Taylor offers the reader an emotionally satisfying story against the background of a poet’s lyrical observations, the heartbreak music of Janis Joplin, and the complications of an imperfect family. Teresa’s journey to rebuild her life is challenging material; Taylor evokes empathy without sentimentality, character screw-ups without judgment. Highly recommended.

[Raymond Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grieving infiltrates Teresa’s life, even after 10 years. She’s not incapacitated, but not moving forward either. For example, she has a book she’s not finishing. Her teaching career is sidetracked. Her relationship with her husband Luke is effectively on hold. (We discover he’s postponed his grieving.) Teresa finds emotional validation with her friend Tim, even as she knows the intimacy with him "has a shelf life.” She reunites with her father, who is savoring present moments, knowing that he’s dying. You may not see Ms. Taylor’s end coming in this realistic and beautifully developed novel. I am pleased to highly recommend it.

[David Surette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lisa Taylor’s THE SHAPE OF WHAT REMAINS is a miracle of a book. Narrator Theresa Calvano is ten years from the death of her precious daughter and feels no closer to recovering her life from before the accident. It’s a wall that encircles her and she is too smart, cynical, and sarcastic to take any shortcuts to a life without her daughter. As she claims her life back, it’s that her honest voice that makes us believe in her halting realization that her life is one worth living. Taylor makes her a believer and the reader too.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this lovely book, Taylor portrays the complexities of long grief with honesty and humor. I loved being party to Teresa's internal musings while knowing none of the other characters had the slightest clue. Teresa is a complex character who thinks it like it is - with a whole gamut of emotion from anger, to exhilaration, to grief, to humor. Taylor took me on an emotional roller coaster and dropped me breathless at the end with a smile on my face.

[Ray Lapointe · Rating 4 out of 5]

The lead protagonist whose grief over the death of her six-year-old daughter takes years to heal with the help of a very good therapist, her mother-in-law, her estranged father and a few others. She also has to deal with her husband who is complicated. The story has some interesting twists and turns and reveals insights on modern family life that resonate for this reader.

[Rebecca Labrador · Rating 3 out of 5]

Teresa turns her attention away from her six-year-old daughter for a split second but then sees her run into the street and killed by a hit-and-run driver. The trauma, guilt, and pain of her loss is so debilitating that Teresa spends the next 10 years in a state of paralysis.

Author Lisa C. Taylor has created a family in crisis that rings true; the characters aren’t necessarily lovable, but they are real. Over the course of the novel, there is certainly depression, grief, infidelity, anger, and estrangement, but there is also reconnection, love, and hope.

Thank you @samijolien for a copy of the novel in exchange for a candid review.

[Michelle Bibliovino · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel of missed, lost and made connections brimming with grief and pain. This story is hard but real and true and a pleasure to be a part of. Thank you to the author for my copy. These opinions are my own.

[Lisa Doggart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this wonderful book of growth as a person. The author did a wonderful job of weaving in human experience and being an authentic human. Looking forward to her future novels.

[Kimberly Kenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply moving, complex story about grief that feels true and affirming, especially for those who've had similar experiences. On a story level, it's a riveting read.

[Lisa Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Lisa Taylor’s novel The Shape of What Remains there is an astonishing sense of raw verisimilitude lacking in so much contemporary fiction. No tired tropes, no authorial intervention just a riveting character-driven narrative that allows the reader to inherit each character's heart and mind.

At times I was reminded of the very best of Elizabeth Strout's novels where flawed people, often battered by tragedy and loss, find redemption through resolute courage and an unfaltering heart.

Taylor skillfully melds the world of academia into the story without relying on the plethora of stereotypes that often muddle novels about professors. Her characters come alive through what they do, think, and say and how they react to what is said and done to them. Taylor’s use of interior monologue when inserted between sections of dialogue is brilliant.

The Shape of What Remains deserves all the accolades it has and will receive.

Bruce Pratt
Author:
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The Trash Detail (Stories)

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