When it comes to Jeff and Julie Kinney, their life is one for the books.
Jeff, author of the bestselling “Wimpy Kid” series, is responsible for the hundreds of millions of books sold nationally. And for 10 years, he and his wife, Julie, have run An Unlikely Story , a bookstore and cafe in their adopted hometown of Plainville, Massachusetts.
Now they want to author another unlikely story: revitalizing their beloved community’s downtown. They expect making that dream a reality will cost about $20 million and take five years.
“We raised our kids in Plainville, Massachusetts, and we had a great run. Now they’re off in college, and we’ve come to really care about the town,” Jeff told The Culture Show. “We want to kind of pay it back to the town and make the town great for the next generation of parents and the next of kids.”
The Kinneys say they want to foster a sense of place.
“When you look at the historical pictures of Plainville, it was a place where people were walking through the downtown and they were gathering. That’s sort of gone away,” Julie said.
She said the bookstore has been a big draw for the region, but there hasn’t been much around it. The couple’s vision is to develop businesses in the four parcels of property surrounding the Kinney’s bookstore.
“We’re calling Plainville Square,” Jeff said. “We’re gonna build an anchor restaurant, we’re gonna build a food and beverage garden … and once we have those things in place, it will feel like a complete space.”
To learn more about the Kinneys’ efforts to rebuild Plainville’s hometown, or to catch up on the latest Wimpy Kid updates, head to https://www.anunlikelystory.com/about-us .
