She discovers that she has an identical twin sister named Lia who has been visiting her town using astral projection, which involves sending her soul outside her body.
It was adapted into the television film of the same name starring Alexz Johnson, Catherine Hicks, Andrew Francis, and Emily Hirst.
Helen Tuttle, Laurie's friend, suggests that Lia was using astral projection, which involves sending the soul outside the body to travel elsewhere in the universe.
On Christmas Eve, Laurie's friend Jeff Rankin plans to bring over books regarding astral projection that Helen had bought for her.
Looking around, she finds herself in a mental hospital and hears nurses talking about unusual circumstances involving Lia and her previous adoptive family.
While everyone else seems to be fooled by Lia, Megan becomes suspicious that Laurie is not in control of her body after she displays uncharacteristic behaviors such as eating white meat, making rude comments about others, and ignoring her old friends Jeff and Helen for new ones.
An actress that Laurie's adoptive mother mentions in the first edition of the novel is Kerry Arquette, the name of one of Duncan's daughters.
Duncan introduced cell phones in the revised edition, which posed a problem because she says that a "strong element of many of my plots is having the protagonist be in a dangerous situation and not being able to reach the outside world".
[8] Megan Abbott, a writer of crime novels, states that the book explores the idea of a double, a people similar but not quite the same as someone else.
The staff stated that readers were captivated by the idea of astral projection, they "loved the story's fast pace", and they saw bigger themes in Stranger in My Face.
[19] Lois Duncan stated in 2009 that Stranger with My Face, along with Locked in Time, were the favorite young adult fiction novels she wrote.
"[21] Jean Fritz, writing for The New York Times, thought the "story is both spine-chilling and perfectly reasonable as Lois Duncan tells it.
"[22] Common Sense Media's Norah Caroline Piehl rated the novel three stars out of five, stating that "Duncan makes out-of-body travel seem so commonplace that even the most literal-minded readers might lose some of their skepticism."
She felt that though Laurie tells the story when she is seventeen, 'her voice often sounds more middle-age than teenage—she repeatedly refers to her younger siblings as "the children," for example.
'[23] Barbara Baskin and Karen Harris write in the book More Notes from a Different Drummer that '[s]uch standard occult ingredients as twins separated at birth and supernatural practices of "exotic" cultures combine with a lightweight teen romance to produce this facile work.
[26][27] Sloan Freer from Radio Times rated the film two stars out of five, stating that "director Jeff Renfroe relies excessively on the soundtrack and shadowy visuals to pepper the early scenes with fake jolts, and manufacture an overall atmosphere of unease."
He felt the only realism from the movie "comes from Johnson's emotionally subtle double performance, which holds the feature together, even in the weak final act.