A Special Kind of Advent

by S.J. Crabb

Victoria Matthews has come a long way since she was known as Vicky Matthews, from flat 23 Roundshaw Towers.
The girl who against all the odds managed to claw her way through school and rise above the expectations of her peers.

She is ruthless, unrelenting and driven.
She works hard and has no room in her life for anything else.
She has no friends and even her own mother flinches when she visits.
Her staff fear her and she rips them apart as though they are candidates for the Apprentice.
The one focus in her life is making it to the top and today that dream is about to come true.
There is only one man standing in her way.

Charlie Monroe.

Born with a silver spoon in his mouth he had his future mapped out for him from an early age.
He was born to wealthy parents and lived the life others could only dream of.
He went to Eton and then Oxford and has never had to try for anything because where his brain fails, his looks win.
Loved by everyone and desired by many.
Popular with his staff and everyone’s friend.

Victoria hates him.

They are both in the running to take over the company where they work when Mr Rowanson retires.
However, to win the company they must complete a set of challenges.
One for every day of December and on Christmas Day the winner will be chosen.
There is one condition.
They must work together and have no other help.

Every morning on the stroke of 8 they must open the Advent Calendar to discover their challenge.
These challenges will determine the winner and failure is not an option.

This is no ordinary Advent calendar and they are not children.
This time it's war and the winner takes it all.

Prepare for a special kind of Advent where anything can happen……even the unexpected!

Genres: Christmas, Romance, Holiday, Chick Lit, Fiction, Contemporary, Contemporary Romance

340 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 1, 2021

About the author

S J Crabb lives in the UK in the South of England and when she isn't writing feels pressured to go to the nearby Zumba class because apparently, that's what you should do these days.
She loves Krispy Kreme doughnuts, shopping and Florida.
You may also find her pretending she can act in her village drama group and she always wants to play the Fairy. One of her goals in life is to take a selfie without looking like she's escaped from somewhere and discover a filter that takes at least twenty years off.
Having tried every craft going she tried her hand at writing and discovered a new passion. If you love Romantic Comedy and happy endings these books may be for you.
She has featured in many bestseller charts on Amazon and her books have been enjoyed around the world.
You can follow her on the usual social media so head on over to her website and click on the links to follow. sjcrabb.com

Reviews

[Elaine and Tess the Springer. I won’t be on GR for a bit. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lovely Christmas love story about family.

A brilliant and romantic Christmas story which starts with the main characters, Vicky and Charlie not on the same wavelength on how to do their job but as December goes on and they are set challenges which they must do together to succeed they come closer together and both end up better people to not just each other but to their families and the staff at their busy law firm that they both want to be MD of.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Charming story about co-workers challenged by their employer to complete a task for each day of the Advent season. The winner will take over the reins of the company.

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is a Christmas book. Perfect to get you into the season's mood.

I wasn't sure that I was going to enjoy it when I started reading, though. Victoria was horrid to everyone and Charlie played the part of the annoying guy to perfection. But it gave me a warm feeling as they realised they needed to change and then actually did. Teh advent challenge was a nice touch and I found myself wanting to do some of those things too. Like ice-skating.

It's true that the story is very predictable, mas I didn't mind. The truth is, I really enjoyed it.

[ade ❦︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first kindle read, a sweet, cozy, opposites attract, work romance, christmas book 🎄Loved it !!

P.S: Goes well with: Santa doesn’t know you like I do- Sabrina Carpenter

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book. I saw a previous review that described it as ‘A Christmas Carol’ with romance. Who wouldn’t like that?
However, the main character Victoria has got to be the most egotistical character I’ve read. Yes I know Scrooge like characters are meant to be but blimey this one took the biscuit. I mean who asks builders why they stop whistling to you? I really struggled to read from her point of view - she was so up and down. One minute she wants to conquer the world the next she’s to prepared to give up everything she’s worked for for love. No one changes that much! And because the book is from her point of view you don’t really see much change to Charlie’s character, just Victoria’s perception of him.
The other thing that I couldn’t stand was the over use of ‘babe’ - 51 times!

[Kay Cardona · Rating 4 out of 5]

I so loved this book. It gets life values into perspective.... as to what is of the utmost importance in life? Added to that... an original kind of love story. I slowed down at the end as I was reluctant to let go of Victoria and Charlie. I loved Charlie's parents too. The humorous element was great too.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5 Stars

This book far exceeded my expectations . I love a well written, engaging holiday rom-com but this book was engaging at every chapter.

Vicky and Charlie are co-workers who are pitted against eachother to make partner at their firm.Vickie is a tough firm boss whereas Charlie is laid back and wants to be everyone's friend. Vickie despises Charlie but their boss asks cwoek together in an adventcevent during December where they complete acts of charity during the weekdays.

As they work together and do good they may just find out that they misjudged eachother ( well mostly Vickie misjudged Charlie).

[Lisa Smit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, dit was echt een leuk boek. Ik had het echt niet verwacht dat dit zo leuk was. Zo schattig om te lezen🤗🤗

[Melissa Borsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent read for the holiday season! Victoria and Charlie are vying for the same promotion but in order for one of them to "win" the coveted top spot they must each complete a daily challenge that is set up as an advent calendar of things to do for the Christmas season. This book was great fun and puts you in a festive mood!

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a special kind of something. The characters were unlikable and the writing was choppy. The reviews were so good; I was expecting something special and I was disappointed.

Victoria is a driven, successful attorney. Charlie is a carefree playbook, but also a successful attorney. They have vastly different styles but have to team up to complete some advent activities in order to win a promotion. Of course, sparks fly as they get in the Christmas spirit.

This was just so cringy. Victoria was so socially awkward and a caricature of a "driven career woman." Thinking it was ok to let a mom watch a kid's performance over Facetime? Come on. Charlie was equally ridiculous. Supposedly he had several office romances with subordinates and they kept quitting because "he could never love them back." Ok, Romeo. They pair up to complete a bunch of Christmas activities that will open their eyes to what they are missing. Along the way, we meet their families and these people were just as awful. Victoria's sister, Lisa, the overwhelmed mom who drowns her sorrows in wine; Charlie's parents, Linda and Harry, who are super successful but totally abandoned their children while they were growing up, and they think women should just shop all day; etc.... Charlie and Victoria's relationship also feels very insta-love and has no tension. At one point they are still adversaries and go to a Nativity performance and Victoria looks over at Charlie and decides, "I want to have children. Charlie's children."

I should have DNF'd this but I thought it would have a strong ending. I was wrong.

[Juliane Deblois · Rating 1 out of 5]

Meh sunshine x grumpy but the girl’s the grumpy one. Doesn’t want to get hurt because of « something that happened like two decades ago and the big thing was she got judged cause she fucked an older guy like calm down girlie pop. She was already with the guy after 12 days and than nothing else happened for bored at 40%

[~Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since December has arrived I have started my Christmas reads. Happens every year, December is for everything Christmas!

This book is a fun read. She’s a Scrooge and he’s, well, the exact opposite in every way. Victoria’s world revolves around her career to the exclusion of everything else, including friends, family and fun! Her staff hates her, is scared of her and basically cringes when she appears. Her team never gets a day off, even for sick kids. Bring them to work or get fired is her motto. Charlie, on the other hand, loves Christmas, his family, having fun, sometimes too much, and his staff adores him even though he is a chaotic disorganized hot mess. He allows more sick days for his team than any other department in the company!

These two are on a collision course. They are in competition for the same executive position, the Managing Director of their company as their boss retires. Their boss has developed a unique plan for determining who will be the best person for directing the company. A very special Advent Calendar with a task a day to be completed, together!! Let the fun and games begin and the chips fall where they may!

Vic and Charlie learn to navigate, together. They find balance. Her in her career and him in his personal life.

My favorite thought from this book is ... we must all do what makes us happy and happiness is not wrapped in a particular package ... don’t be afraid to take the path less traveled.

So glad I picked this book up. It made me smile and laugh. It made me happy!

[Susanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such an enjoyable story. Victoria and Charlie are both in the running for the MD position in the law form. But, they have to do an advent calender together in order to determine who will take the top spot. They have to work together for every challenge. Despite being polar opposites of each other, both start to reassess their lives and soon come to care very much about each other, while discovering things about themselves. The challeges provide some rather amusing situations and their feelings for each other slowly come to the fore. Fun, lighthearted and no spice.

[Elizabeth Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am new to SJ Crabb's writing ...loved the cover ...totally pulled me in. I have to ask to readers prefer not knowing the ending? sometimes i enjoy being able to see the course the book will head? such amazing characters. well written. I love how many great Christmas (holiday reads) I have found this year. must read. loved it!!

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a sweet Christmas romance about two very different people who gradually find their common ground with challenges posted by their mutual boss as an incentive to a promotion. I enjoyed it more than I expected to. It's always fun to read a nice Christmas story this time of year.

[The_5ft_reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Felt a bit like a Christmas carol but with advent tasks instead of ghosts to make vicky change her ways .... fun cute read!

[Sandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely a feel good happy Christmas book.

[Lcr · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Special Kind of Advent is an absolute delight and I loved it from start to finish. Victoria and Charlie could not be more different and they both want the same promotion. What happens next will change not only their lives but the way in which they see things. This is a funny, heartwarming, thought provoking book that you will not want to put down. The characters are great, real and honest, faults and all and covers all walks of life. This is a book you will remember and it would make a beautiful film. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. If you only read one Christmas book this year .. make it this one.
I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.

[Diane Bergan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved a Special Kind of Advent, it shows how at times we forget what life is all about, Sharon has brought this home in this book it is fun and down to earth. A couple of bits made me sit back and think.
Please read Sharon books as she is a very talented writer, I now have to wait for her next book.
Well done Sharon

I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.

[Georgie Willmer · Rating 2 out of 5]

A classic enemies to lovers story but with a Christmas twist. The flip flopping internal monologue of Vicky towards Charlie was frustrating and repetitive.. how did it go from her saying he’s her nemesis but then a couple pages later saying she wants babies with him. Some great life value lessons chucked in there with some beautiful lines though!

[Lorrie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Annoying characters. Cold-hearted Victoria melts in minutes when paired with womanizing Charlie in a Christmas challenge to determine who will become managing director of their law firm. Charlie seems to be living in 1970, calling everyone ‘Babe’ and making endless sexist comments. We get to meet his parents, who seem to be living in 1953, so that explains a lot. Charlie doesn’t change at all over the course of the book - his ‘womanizing’ is a facade hiding his lonely tender heart. He continues to make sexist remarks and call everyone Babe all through the book. Victoria, however, changes completely and while it’s entirely unbelievable how fast that happens, it’s also offensive that ~she~ is the only one to change. 0.000001⭐️. This book is a piece of Christmas crap, babe!

[Marylebone · Rating 1 out of 5]

Seriously, how do things like this get published? Put aside the spelling and grammar errors on every page (not to mention the truly bizarre frequency with which every character refers to someone as "babe") and there's still the disturbingly high drivel factor. I actually went and checked the publish date because it's so hard to believe it wasn't written at least fifty years ago. Thought maybe they just slapped on a bright new cover to dupe readers. It wasn't so I'm at a loss for any other excuse.

[Tanya · Rating 5 out of 5]

She would give Alan Sugar a run for his money. She is hard on everyone and she is so strict with everyone as well. She will do anything to get to the top. He has everything he has ever needed. Now they are up for the same promotion. The boss sets them challenges. What are they? How will it go? Follow them to see

I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.

[Karyn Donachy-Schwanen · Rating 3 out of 5]

started out a good story plot

However what soon became very apparent is the over familiarity with new people that isn’t realistic. In what part of the UK do people use babe? As far as I know- no one. That irritated me. Too over familiarity. Too much repetitive fluffing. And too many double sided over pretentious stuff.
If it were redone shaving off the over use of babe and trimmed down it would get more stars from me.

[MaryEllen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This story was written in the fist person. That took a bit to get used to.

The ending was predictable, but the journey was not.
The characters were archetypal at the start, but the story shows them grow and it was wonderful to see! I was pleased with what they learned and with the ending.

I received a free copy of this book and voluntarily chose to review it.

[Staceywh_17 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book! Full of festive fun, office romance & learning not to take yourself so seriously 🎄🎅

[Natward1 · Rating 3 out of 5]

2 1/2 stars. It wasn’t bad. The biggest problem I had was with Victoria. She was an uncaring, unfeeling, singularly minded, ruthless business woman. That wasn’t necessarily the problem though. The problem was how much she tells us about this fact. Her inner monologuing about all of the reasons why she is the way she is and all of the examples of how she is the way she is takes up at least half the book. It got so repetitive. And it made her seem robotic. There weren’t any real deep or meaningful reasons she was so driven, or any reasons that would warrant constantly telling us how serious and ruthless she is. And because of this, every time she would like laugh with Charlie or say that they stayed up talking and laughing and joking around it took me right out of the story because it was way too out of character when in the next paragraph she is once again reminding us of how robotic she is. It’s giving me whiplash. Now,I know the point is that she changes around him or that she changes in general for the whole character growth. But then the inner monologue needs to also change. Which, it did sometimes, but more of the time it was just her continuing to remind us of how ruthless and unfeeling she is.

I did like how she changed and the author did a pretty good job of showing reasons she changes, but i wish it would have been just a bit better. Less abrupt or something. Or honestly maybe it really does just come back to that constant repetitive inner monologue that makes her changes feel more clunky and not as believable.

Also, she falls for Charlie way too fast, way too easily, and out of nowhere. For her character, it would have been more believable if she didn’t even realize she was falling for Charlie until like closer to the end. Like have her start wanting to help him uncharacteristically or defend him for something or just whatever and have it be a surprise to her even. Like the feeling of loving someone, especially Charlie is so unknown to her that she literally doesn’t even recognize it until she acts way out of character with him or does some grand gesture or something. As it is, she says she doesn’t love easily, but now I don’t believe that since one look at Charlie was all it took for her to like him all of the sudden. So it just doesn’t mesh.

One last thing, Victoria and Charlie don’t have a ton of chemistry. It isn’t non existent or anything, but Charlie is a little lifeless on the page somehow. And she’s robotic so together they are just meh. I wasn’t really swooning over Charlie and he wasn’t doing anything towards Victoria that really stood out and made me love them together. It wasn’t horrible though, but I would have liked more. Maybe if she’d get rid of the constant inner monologue telling us how robotic she is I’d feel more towards the two. And Charlie needed to be more somehow.

[Rymer Reads · Rating 2 out of 5]

Light spoilers.

I disliked a lot about this book. The MC is very unlikeable and goes to great lengths to repeatedly explain how she isn’t like other girls. The book is littered with spelling mistakes, she seems to use “cotton-picking” a couple of times to mean “bloody” (eg “of course he cotton-picking did”) which was a really weird choice, and I was very close to DNFing multiple times but wanted to know how it ended up.

The main character feels it’s very important to her to express repeatedly what a feminist she is, yet is disappointed not to be cat called because she is just a girl after all. To the extent that later in the book she confronts the workmen about why they have stopped catcalling, they say they’ve been instructed not to, and she says that is ridiculous because it actually makes women feel good. Like really??? She says while other girls pored over Harry Potter she was studying JK Rowling (gross, but I presume this predates knowing how awful she is), and her relationship with her competitor/colleague really toes the line of consent on many occasions. In fact, later in the book, she praises him for not listening to her when she kept saying no, and for “wearing her down” because if he hasn’t done that, she wouldn’t have realised how good he was.

Honestly the first 90% of the book would have been rated half a star. But the last 10% was ALL the Christmas fuzzies so I’m glad that (despite how frequently the book made me angry) I persevered and did eventually get the festive vibe I was hoping for. It brought the star rating up to a 2. Everybody redeems themselves (mostly through quite fantastical personality transplants!) and there’s a cute game of giving eachother the gift of a promise at the Christmas dinner table that was nice to read.

But honestly there are other books that would give you that vibe, so I’d probably recommend giving this one a miss!

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my Christmas reads this year was A Special Kind of Advent by S. J. Crabb. I loved this book, it was so much fun, probably the best Christmas book I've read this year, so far anyway.

In the book we have Victoria. Victoria is horrible. She has no friends, her staff is afraid of her, her mother is afraid of her, she works hard, she works constantly, and she expects everyone else to do the same. Her focus is to make it to the top and today is the day it is going to happen.

Then there is Charlie. Charlie's parents are wealthy, Charlie has anything he wants. He went to Eton and then to Oxford. Charlie is handsome and everyone loves him. He is popular with his staff and a friend to everyone. Everyone but Victoria.

But now Mr. Rowanson is retiring and Victoria is sure she is about to take over the company, until she gets to Mr. Rowanson's office and finds Charlie there as well. Either of them may win the company, to do it they must complete a set of challenges. One for every day of Advent and on Christmas day they will find out who the winner is. Oh, and they must work together with no help from anyone else. Every morning at 8 AM their new Advent challenge is opened. And the challenges? Here are a few:

Write a holiday greeting to someone in the armed forces.

Donate a toy to the local children's hospital.

Send a letter to Santa

Watch a Christmas movie

Serve a meal at a local homeless shelter.

I loved this book and plan to make it a every year read. If I remember, which I'm not at all sure about. Someone remind me next December.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book! Victoria and Charles run their respective departments in an impressove London law firm. Victoria thinks Charles is too lax and friendly with his staff, Charles thinks Victoria is too uptight and allows the job to be her life. Both of them want the job of Managing Director that is coming open in the New Year. To their surprise, the firm's owner decides they must complete an "Advent Challenge", one task each day of Dec., leading up to Christmas. But, worse than that, they must complete it TOGETHER. Since this is a Christmas romance, it is inevitable that instead of merely tolerating each other, they are drawn together. Vicky and Charlie become an item!
One of the things I liked best about this book, beyond the evolution of both main characters, was the fact that they knew about half way through the challenge/book that they were in love. I kept waiting for that tired old romance trope, the BIG MISUNDERSTANDING, which would of course, tear them apart, only to have them reunite at the very end of the book. To my joy, and great surprise, Ms. Crabb never reverted to that. Instead, she thoughtfully continued to show the growth of the characters, and allowed the HEA ending to feel real and lasting. This is the first of her books that I have read, but I can promise you, it won't be the last!!