It’s her lungs that have been ravaged by cancer, and she needs an oxygen tank to breathe. It’s his bones, and he has a prosthetic leg. And you know, even as you begin the tale of their young romance, that the end will be 100 kinds of awful, not so much a vale as a brutal canyon of tears.

Courtesy of Penguin Young Readers Group

Still you press on. At least I did. And I’m hardly alone. Some 150,000 copies, including e-books, of “The Fault in Our Stars,” a novel by a hugely gifted writer named John Green, have been sold since it was published last month. Twice that many are in print. Those are big numbers in the beleaguered world of publishing, and this is the best part: many of the book’s fans—a sizeable majority, no doubt—fall into the same demographic category as its protagonists. They’re teens.

The same teens who were supposed to turn their backs on fiction because of all those television channels. And all those video games. And the distractions of the iPod and then the iPhone and now the iPad, which—what do you know?—turns out to be an excellent way not just to watch movies but to read. Teens use it for that, as they do their Kindles and Nooks, which are Christmas-list mainstays at this point.

In fact one of the happiest and most hopeful developments in publishing over the last decade is the expansion of the sub-market known as “young adult,” or YA, to which “The Fault in Our Stars” belongs. Bookstores are assigning YA titles more space. Serious novelists who would once have blanched at the thought of writing YA novels are giving them a try. And publishing houses are pumping out more and more of them, creating special YA imprints and lines where they didn’t exist.

“Everybody and their brothers wants to enter the market,” said Beverly Horowitz, a veteran editor at Delacorte Press who was on the YA train long before it roared so mightily down the tracks. And while part of the explanation for its velocity is the way the “Harry Potter,” “Twilight,” and “Hunger Games” series have blurred the boundary between children’s and adults’ fare, attracting readers of all ages, another part is simply the undiminished power of the written word, be it pixels on a screen or ink on a page. Kids still thrill to it—at least those kids privileged with the time and the tools—and not just when there’s otherworldly menace involved.

Suzanne Plunkett/Bloomberg News

“The Fault in Our Stars,” which recently logged its fifth consecutive week in the top spot on the New York Times list of bestselling children’s hardcover chapter books, contains no sorcery, no vampires and no apocalypse, not unless heartbreak counts as the end of the world, as it probably should. Green’s story of lovers who aren’t so much star-crossed as star-cursed leans on literature’s most durable assets: finely wrought language, beautifully drawn characters and a distinctive voice, meaning that of Hazel, 16, who narrates the story, reporting that she falls in love with Augustus, 17, “the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

She’s wickedly blunt about her limitations, which include having “lungs that suck at being lungs.” She’s understated about her fears: “I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it.”

She’s soulful. Waiting in Augustus’s driveway while he has a teary fight with his mother, she ruminates that “the weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.”

And she’s a committed, fervent reader. In fact “The Fault in Our Stars” is in no small part about the power of literature itself. Hazel is obsessed with a novel, “An Imperial Affliction,” about a cancer patient much like her. And I’ve encountered no better description of what books in general and one book in particular can mean to someone than hers.

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

“Sometimes,” she says, “you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all humans read the book. And then there are books like ‘An Imperial Affliction,’ which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

“An Imperial Affliction,” she adds, “was my book, the way my body was my body and my thoughts were my thoughts.”

I can’t say I feel quite that passionately about “The Fault in Our Stars.” But I admire it enormously, more so than most of the adult-targeted novels I’ve read of late. And I found myself eager to share it. I bought a copy for a dear friend’s 12-year-old daughter. Then I sent a copy each to my two brothers, for them to pass on to any of their seven children who might be interested. I sent another copy to my sister, for her four kids.

Several days after the copies were delivered, my niece Leslie, 15, sent me a Facebook message that was its own powerful affirmation of reading’s blessedly stubborn allure.

“John Green is one of my favorite writers,” she said. “His book ‘Looking for Alaska’ is arguably my favorite book. It changed my outlook on life considerably. When I saw ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ on the counter, I almost passed out I was so happy. I would absolutely love to talk to you about the book once I finish.”

Few things would make me happier.