Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods

This is a book in a series. I will give a little background. In underland (a land under the ground) humans live in a sort of medieval society but with certain breaks from that. Everything down there is magnified, spiders, rats, cockroaches, ants, bats, frogs, they even have some sort of preserved plesiosaur species. Anyway, that is it for the background.


So Gregor had previously gotten a prophecy and a note that one of his "friends", a rat, would send escorts. The escorts turn out to be millions of little rats dragging them out of the apartment. Finally Gregor decides to go with his sister Boots, but his mom wants to go as well because she wants to know what happens to him if anything at all does. So Gregor brings her along. It turns out that The Curse Of The Warmbloods has struck and is some sort of the Black Plague. On a mission to dispense some anti-flea powder to the rats to stop the plague from spreading, Gregor's mom gets bitten, and gets the plague. This gives Gregor the incentive to go off of a mission to find a plant called starshade which is the cure. On the way members of the party die off from huge carnivorous plants, quicksand, giant poison dart frogs, and other things. Finally when they get to the one and only field starshade, an army of giant ants come marching in to destroy the starshade and kill off the party. They succeed in eradicating the starshade, but don't kill off the party. They all sit around thinking that underland will be doomed and the plague will spread to overland (our world). Then one of the rats who came (one died in quicksand, the other by a plant) points out the importance of one puzzling stanza in the prophecy.
Turn and turn and turn again. 
You see the what but not the when. 
Remedy and wrong entwine, 
and so they form a single vine.
The turning part, if facing the field of starshade, makes you end up looking back at the city. From what they had seen, they realize that the doctors at the hospital were probably very nervous as they were because they had started a plague. The rat left says that it was probably created as a biological weapon to kill the rats with. A missing in action person they met in the forest agrees with him, so they all set off back home. It turns out to be true and that the doctors and nurses (before they were all executed for their crimes, harsh, I know) were hoarding a whole cave of antidotes. Then everyone is cured and Gregor goes back up. And then, because there was no logical explanation for where he got his weird shoes/socks made of lizard skin, he spills the beans to his neighbor who had originally suspected something strange was going on in his first trip.


What I liked is the prophecy. I always find prophecies really interesting, because they have a sort of aura of "Well, it could be this, or it could be that." and always when coming true, are sure to be surprising. What I didn't like was that the book came only in large print, which drives me crazy. And that even though it was clearly told in third person, I kept on thinking it was first from Gregor's point of view.