At the opening of this, the fifth and final entry in The Underland Chronicles, Gregor discovers why no one has told him what’s in “The Prophecy of Time”: He is to die. In short order, an airlift of mouse refugees to Regalia, capital of the human territories in the Underland, gives way to a siege by the fascist Bane and his rat hordes, abetted by the giant moles the humans had displaced centuries before when they came to the Underland. As gallons of blood spill, Gregor’s math-whiz sister Lizzie helps a multi-species team break the rats’ Code of Claw, and Gregor himself agonizes over whether the cause for which he fights is a just one. Perhaps Collins’s greatest achievement in these tales is the effortless introduction of weighty geopolitical ethics into rip-roaring adventure. It seems as elusive in the Underland as up above, but Gregor and his companions, including the unforgettable rat Ripred, may yet find a way. The resolution is bittersweet but faintly hopeful—a fitting end for an unflinchingly gutsy series whose deftly drawn characters have always lived dangerously. (Fiction. 9-12)
