shocked, but her mother Sarah expected it; after all, she began to grow wings at about the same age -- but her mother cut them off. Linnet and Sarah don't know what to do, but Linnet stumbles into a community of people like her, who live in a secluded place in the mountains, under the threat of exposure. I thought the premise was unusual and interesting, but it wasn't developed enough to really grab me. 

It was first published in 2000, which means it was out when you were in Elementary School. It involves "wings" in the title and hereditary wings which must be hidden or removed. They generally can't fly, but the reviews suggest that Linnet does manage flight by the end.

A Life Apart

A Life Apart tells two stories. The first is of Ritwik’s; a story of a young man’s escape from a blighted childhood of squalor and abuse in Calcutta to the edge of what he considers to be a new world, full of possibilities, in England, where he has a chance to start all over again. But his past, especially the scarred, all-consuming relationship with his mother, is a minefield: will Ritwik find the salvation he is looking for?

Could it arrive in the form of the second story that comprises the novel, the one he is writing himself, the story of an Englishwoman in the old world of Bengal on the eve of India’s first partition? Or could it be in the figure of the eighty-six-year-old Anne