You wouldn’t necessarily think of a cancer support group as a place where teens meet and fall in love — but that’s exactly what happens to Hazel and Augustus, the young protagonists in The Fault in Our Stars, the latest from author John Green.

Hazel is 16 — she has thyroid cancer with a “satellite” in the lungs that makes her feel like she’s drowning. Augustus, or Gus, is a little older, lithe and handsome. He’s lost a quarter of a leg to cancer but tells people, “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up.”

They meet in a support group for young cancer patients that’s held in a church basement: two smart, funny, doomed young people in Indianapolis who find support groups a pompous bore, but sure are glad to find each other.

“The characters came to me first,” Green tells NPR’s Scott Simon. “I worked as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital about 12 years ago for five months. During that time I started wanting to write about these kinds of young people — it just took awhile.”