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When a Man Loves a Woman is Alina Adams's 1998 contemporary romance, set inside a thinly fictionalized Manhattan tabloid newsroom. The premise (a hard-driving female city editor butting heads with a new feature writer who was assigned over her objections) is romance-novel standard. What lifts it is the newsroom procedural detail, which Adams sources from her broadcast-journalism background.
The book is short, fast, and confidently genre. The romance plot lands cleanly and the workplace conflict reads as observed rather than invented (story meetings, deadline negotiation, the politics of which story gets the front page). For pre-Plum era 1990s romance with strong working-life detail, this is the kind of book that does not get the credit it earned.
Recommended for romance readers who liked the newsroom-as-romance-set books of the late 1990s (Susan Elizabeth Phillips's I'm Not Your Other Half era), and for readers looking for books like When a Man Loves a Woman as an Adams pre-mystery primer. Three stars and a useful entry point.
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