For a book that touts the power of storytelling, I would be remiss not to recommend that casual readers flip to pages of aid recipients telling stories from their own perspectives. Section 2 (Chapters 4, 5, and 6) are all focused on stories from aid recipients. Since each chapter begins with a story, the beginning of any of those chapters is a great place to dive right in.For example, in Chapter 4, readers will meet Lilly Gibbs, a powerhouse of a woman who was married, owned a home, and had her own business when her husband’s emotional and physical abuse plunged her into addiction, joblessness, and homelessness. Soon after, she was diagnosed with diabetes. Her story is one of strength and struggle, despair and hope. The chapter continues with other “origin stories” of how people ended up needing help in the first place.Chapter 5 opens in a financial literacy class at a local service agency helping people learn the basics of balancing budgets to make ends meet. “My son breaks his toy, and he expects me to buy him another one,” shares one woman in the class. “I’m like, ‘I ain’t got no money.’ He says, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen some money.’ ‘Well, that money was here, but now it’s gone.’” The room erupts in laughter, with participants recognizing a similar experience of income that disappears all too quickly. The stories that follow depict the challenges people face in day to day living with the help of public assistance.Throughout these chapters, there are hundreds of stories from other aid recipients, all unique, but with all-too-familiar challenges. Major illness or injury, domestic abuse, loss of job, or one bad choice can be the difference between self-sufficiency and the need for government assistance. Lack of quality education, affordable childcare, professional growth opportunities and access to jobs that pay a living wage exacerbate these challenges. Systemic inequalities including formal and informal policies that disadvantage the poor and people of color often underlie these more proximate causes.There are two other places I would direct the reader flipping through this book in a bookstore. The first is page 65 where they can find a graphic that compares the myth of the American Dream with the legend of the “Welfare Queen.” The image makes it clear that the welfare queen story has been constructed as the antithesis of the American Dream, ensuring that the welfare system and its recipients will be remembered, and reviled, as subverting the foundational values upon which this country was founded. The second is page 294, which offers readers strategies for how to tell more accurate stories about welfare to counter the unfair stereotypes that have gripped public consciousness in this country.The primary goal of this book is to challenge the stereotypical stories about welfare and its recipients and offer more accurate, fair, and nuanced stories from aid recipients themselves. More than that, however, the book offers strategies to readers for challenging these stereotypes in their own stories and their own lives.Economists and policy wonks can develop strategies, policies, and plans, but without the will of politicians and the public, the best laid plans will suffer the fate of the tree that falls in the woods with no one to hear it. If a politician believes the poor are lazy cheats, she will likely not vote to fund job training or childcare vouchers. One way to change these perceptions is through stories.We can start by de-stigmatizing poverty and welfare and by tackling the stories about welfare with an understanding of just how powerful stories can be. Not only are stories crucial to how we perceive and construct our world—they are enduring. As Chip and Dan Heath argue in their New York Times bestselling book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, stories are sticky; with their concrete details and remarkable plots, stories are eminently memorable. Unlike statistics and arguments, stories are remembered more clearly and more often than information conveyed in more abstract ways.Stories are also entertaining. We tell stories for amusement and sociability, not just as proof for some point we want to make. In this way, stories can operate like epidemics: spreading virally from one person to another. A single story of welfare fraud told a hundred times can start to feel like a hundred cases of welfare fraud. Further, stories can encode deep-seated beliefs that we may be unwilling to share so explicitly and boldly. Our stories betray our fears and desires in ways our direct speech does not.But just as stories can perpetuate stereotypes, they can also dismantle them. Social science research provides the blueprint for advocacy through storytelling. Empathy, familiarity, and internal and external coherence are particularly powerful rhetorical elements of persuasive narratives. Reframing narratives already in the oral tradition is particularly effective in identifying stories told by aid recipients that are most likely to change people’s hearts and minds.Overthrowing the Queen does not cherry-pick the stories told about welfare in the U.S. All the stories, true, false, and everywhere in between are included. But analysis of these stories offers readers the opportunity to learn and retell stories from people with firsthand experience relying on aid to survive. Further, the final chapter of the book suggests strategies for highlighting authentic narratives with the best chances of being heard.In this way, the book operates as a corrective. With fraud rates in aid programs such as Food Stamps well below 2%, we would need to tell 50-75 stories of people working hard to make ends meet for every one story of fraud. In the interest of fairness, we have a long way to go.