I can't help but shake my head at the bad advice given on here. This was the same advice given to me a year ago when I was hit by Penguin on some sites and the same advice given when I received unnatural link warnings back in the build my rank days.
Everyone told me to ditch my sites, give up, throw in the towel and start new sites. Thank goodness I didn't listen to that advice as it's proven to be wrong time and time again.
I've managed to recover all of my sites rankings except for one, and that one I only submitted disavows for.
The truth is you can recover your rankings from a Penguin update. No, it won't be an instant recovery but if you had any rankings that were worthwhile and your site was making money I highly recommend it. What I did was clean up my sites and built new ones at the same time.
Now for many of the niches I've got two well ranking sites. It's up to you how you move forward but know that Penguin is recoverable as long as you clean up links and wait for the next refresh.